False Positive (FP)
A screening alert generated by the system when a potential match is found, but upon analyst review, the subject is confirmed to be not the sanctioned individual or entity.
False positives are the dominant operational cost of sanctions screening, not an edge case. Common names, partial data, and phonetic collisions between unrelated people all produce alerts that look identical to a true match until an analyst compares the full set of identifiers — date of birth, nationality, which list, which programme. At high alert volumes this becomes screening fatigue: analysts desensitised by repetitive false positives who start giving every alert less scrutiny, which is precisely the failure mode that lets a genuine match slip through.
The correct lever for reducing false positives is threshold tuning and better corroborating data — richer identifiers on both the entity being screened and the list data it is compared against — never lowering recall by narrowing what the system searches for in the first place. A system tuned to generate fewer false positives by matching less aggressively has traded a visible cost (analyst time) for an invisible one (missed designations).