Treasury took 84 names off the sanctions list in one week, and added more in the four days around it
The removals are counted exactly. The additions cannot be totalled from the same documents without guessing. Anyone who nets the two figures against each other is publishing a number that does not exist, and the reason is in Treasury's own text.
Between 24 and 31 July 2026 the Treasury's Office of Foreign Assets Control published four press releases. Three of them added names to sanctions lists. One of them took 84 names off. All four are public, and all four are US federal works, so anyone can read them without permission or payment.
The four releases are addressed individually at the foot of this article. Each address is permanent. The index page they were published on is not, and that turns out to matter, for reasons set out at the end.
What Treasury published in seven days
| Date, 2026 | Action | The count in the release's own words |
|---|---|---|
| 24 July | Zanjani network designations | “four individuals and nine entities” |
| 27 July | Sanctions modernization, second round | “removed 84 individuals and entities” and “improved identifying information for 22 list entries” |
| 29 July | Strait of Hormuz insurance scheme and shadow fleet | “two firms”, plus eight further companies named individually, plus vessels identified as blocked property |
| 30 July | Mahan Air and IRGC networks | “six entities and individuals in China, India, Russia, and Iran”, plus a front company named separately in the same release |
Confirmed Source: the four releases themselves, read in full on 5 August 2026. The right-hand column quotes or paraphrases each document's own stated count and adds nothing to it.
The removals are counted exactly
The 27 July release is the second action in a sanctions modernization effort that the Secretary of the Treasury, Scott Bessent, announced in May 2026. It states three figures without ambiguity. Eighty-four individuals and entities were removed from the Specially Designated Nationals and Blocked Persons List. Identifying information was improved on 22 list entries. Eighteen sets of duplicate entries were resolved, where the same person or property had been listed more than once under separate entries.
The same release records that on 29 June 2026 OFAC launched an online portal through which a person or their authorised representative can petition to be removed from a sanctions list.
What the 84 were, in Treasury's own description
This is the part that changes the arithmetic. The release states that those removed “include individuals and entities no longer considered U.S. national security or foreign policy priorities: some deceased individuals, defunct entities, and targets sanctioned more than 20 years ago, some of whom lack sufficient information for effective compliance screening.”
It gives the reason for the second category too. Older entries sometimes lack the identifying detail that is now routine, and OFAC states that adding identifiers such as place and date of birth or nationality means “compliance-related screening of these names will prove less burdensome for financial institutions.”
This paragraph is reasoning, not measurement. A name removed because the person is dead, or because the entity no longer exists, or because it was one of two duplicate entries for the same thing, does not represent the same event as a name added this month for running a shipping extortion scheme. The first is a record being corrected. The second is an enforcement action. Counting them in the same column requires a decision that neither document makes.
We are stating that distinction. We are not measuring it. Treasury does not publish a breakdown of how many of the 84 were deceased, how many were defunct, how many were duplicates and how many were simply old. Without that breakdown, the composition of the 84 is described but not quantified, and we are not going to estimate it.
The additions cannot be totalled from the releases
Three separate obstacles sit in the way of a single figure, and none of them is difficult to see once the documents are open rather than summarised.
The first is that the releases count different kinds of thing. The 24 July release separates four individuals from nine entities. The 29 July release designates two firms, then names eight further companies, then separately identifies vessels as blocked property. A vessel is property, not a person, and adding it to a headcount of people and companies produces a number that answers no question.
The second is that at least one headline count is ambiguous against the body of its own release. The 30 July document opens by designating “six entities and individuals” and later states that OFAC “is also designating” a front company affiliated with the IRGC. Whether that company is inside the six or additional to them is not stated. One reading gives six, the other gives seven. We do not know which is correct, so we are not publishing either as a total.
The third is that the 29 July release contains a running figure on a different basis again. It records that since the beginning of the year OFAC has sanctioned over 100 vessels linked to what it calls Iran's shadow fleet. That is a year-to-date count of property, not a count of the week's additions, and it belongs in neither column.
So the comparison a reader most wants is the one that is not available. Eighty-four removals against a total number of additions would be the obvious story of the week, and we cannot publish it, because the second figure cannot be produced from the source documents without assumptions we would then be asking you to trust.
What we can publish is every individual count, quoted from the release that stated it, which is the table above. A reader who wants to construct a total can see exactly which decisions they would have to make to get one.
What this does to what an ordinary person pays
Treasury names the mechanism itself. Its stated purpose in adding identifiers to old entries is that screening those names becomes less burdensome for financial institutions. Sanctions screening runs on ordinary payments: transfers, wires, new accounts and international transactions are checked against these lists by the banks that process them. An entry with thin identifying detail matches more innocent people than an entry with a date of birth and a nationality attached.
That is the chain, stated as a mechanism, and we have not measured a single link of it. We hold no figure for how many payment screening alerts these 84 entries generated, no figure for how many were false matches on uninvolved people, no figure for what those checks cost the banks that ran them, and no figure for how much of that cost reaches a customer.
Treasury asserts that compliance will be less burdensome. That is Treasury's stated expectation about the effect of its own action, and we report it as such. It is not a measurement, and this publication does not hold one.
The address of a public document is not the same as the document
One finding from checking this story is worth recording on its own, because it goes to whether a public record can actually be reached.
The 24 July release was recorded in our own source notes from the Treasury press release index on 1 August. By 4 August, eleven days after publication, it had already moved off page one of that index, and a check against the index alone suggested the release might not exist. It does exist. It sits at a permanent address, unchanged, exactly where it always was.
Nobody restricted anything. The index simply carries a fixed number of items and rolls the older ones off as new ones arrive, which is how almost every news index on the internet works. The consequence is that a citation pointing at an index verifies nothing after a fortnight, for a person or for any automated system trying to check a claim.
Every Treasury citation in this publication now carries the individual release identifier. The addresses below are permanent.
Sources and verification
Addresses below are printed in full so you can copy one and check us. We do not link out.
All four releases. US Department of the Treasury, Office of Foreign Assets Control. US federal works, public domain. Each read in full on 5 August 2026. Confirmed
24 July 2026, “Treasury Further Dismantles Iranian Financier Zanjani's Network.” Source of the four individuals and nine entities figure.
https://home.treasury.gov/news/press-releases/sb0576
27 July 2026, “Treasury Announces Second Round of Sanctions Removals, Updates in Modernization Initiative.” Source of the 84 removals, the 22 updated entries, the 18 duplicate sets, the quoted description of who was removed, the quoted statement on screening burden, and the 29 June 2026 portal date.
https://home.treasury.gov/news/press-releases/sb0578
29 July 2026, “Treasury Disrupts Iranian Regime's Strait of Hormuz Extortion Network.” Source of the two firms, the eight further companies, the vessel identifications and the year-to-date figure of over 100 vessels.
https://home.treasury.gov/news/press-releases/sb0581
30 July 2026, “Treasury Cracks Down on Global Networks Enabling Iran's Mahan Air and IRGC.” Source of the six entities and individuals figure and of the separately named front company that creates the ambiguity described above.
https://home.treasury.gov/news/press-releases/sb0582
The full list of entries removed and updated on 27 July is published by OFAC separately from the press release. Confirmed https://ofac.treasury.gov/recent-actions/20260727
Not measured here. The composition of the 84 removals by category, any total count of names added across the four releases, the number of payment screening alerts generated by any of these entries, the false match rate on any of them, the compliance cost to any financial institution, and the share of any such cost that reaches a customer.