Taxpayer Identification Number (TIN)

A Taxpayer Identification Number (TIN) is a unique identification number for a business that is used by the Internal Revenue Service (IRS). All businesses will have some form of TIN. The list of TIN types are the following:

• Employer Identification Number (EIN)
• Social Security Number (SSN)
• Individual Taxpayer Identification Number (ITIN)
• Taxpayer Identification Number for Pending U.S. Adoptions (ATIN)
• Preparer Taxpayer Identification Number (PTIN)

Enigma primarily focuses on entities that have EINs. The Federal Government requires that all legal entities who have employees obtain an EIN that is issued by the IRS. EINs do not expire. Once an EIN has been issued to an entity, it will not be reissued. As such, each EIN is unique to a business and persists over time.

EIN/TIN Verification

Verifying the EIN of a business is a critical component of Know Your Business (KYB) regulations. When a client requests a EIN be verified, Enigma will verify that the EIN is valid and that it matches the business name submitted. The EIN should be passed as a 9-digit string.

The IRS only accepts business names up to 40 characters. If you request EIN verification with a name longer than this, we will truncate it to 40 characters and submit the shortened name for verification.

Enigma can return any of the following responses:

In the case of a "Failure" response

If a "failure" status is received then the client will need to retry EIN/TIN verification. Before retrying, we recommend the client confirms the EIN is correct with the business. In the event of an IRS availability error, keep in mind the IRS can be down for a few minutes to several hours at a time. If retrying is not ideal or continues to be unsuccessful, the client can request documents from the business to verify the EIN. The IRS recommends a few ways to verify an EIN in the event the business has lost or misplaced it.

Verifying TINs (including SSNs) against a submitted person

Some small businesses like a sole proprietorship or a single-member LLC have TINs (like an SSN or EIN) that must be verified against a person's name instead of the business name. Enigma does not currently support verifying TINs against a submitted person. Please contact the Enigma sales team if this functionality is required for your use case.

Instructions to access this attribute

The TIN verification attribute is an optional add-on attribute that is not included in a package by default. The attribute must first be added to your account to access. If you are interested in using this attribute, please contact our sales team to have it added to your account.

Once the attribute has been added to your account, you can retrieve it by passing tin_verification in the attrsparameter and passing a 9-digit string in the tin field. If you only want to retreive the TIN attribute (e.g. retrying in case of a failure), then you can omit the package parameter and only the TIN attribute will be returned.

For instructions on how to integrate with the API, please visit the KYB endpoint page.

Request example:

curl --request POST 'https://api.enigma.com/v1/kyb/?package=verify&attrs=tin_verification&top_n=1&match_confidence=0.5' \
--header 'Content-Type: application/json' \
--header 'x-api-key: YOUR-API-KEY' \
--data-raw '{
    "data": {
        "names": [
            "Enigma Technologies"
        ],
        "addresses": [
            {
                "street_address1": "245 5th Ave",
                "city": "New York",
                "state": "NY",
                "postal_code": "10016"
            }
        ],
        "tin": [
            "000000000"
        ]
    }
}'

Response example:

    "risk_summary": {
        "legal_existence_risk_rating": "low",
        "activity_risk_rating": "low",
        "watchlist_risk_rating": "low",
        "overall_risk_rating": "low",
        "tasks": [
            {
                "task_name": "tin_verification",
                "status": "success",
                "result": "tin_verified",
                "reason": "TIN and Name combination matches IRS records"
            }
        ]
    },

Data sources

• Internal Revenue Service (IRS)