EIN Verification: There Is No Public Lookup, and What to Do

Start with the answer most pages avoid.

There is no public IRS lookup for EINs. No searchable directory of private company tax identification numbers. Nothing equivalent to Companies House, or the Estonian register, or even the free tier of Delaware's entity search.

Any site promising an EIN lookup is selling access to a private database assembled from filings and public records, not to an IRS service. Some of those are useful. None of them are the IRS.

What does exist are three real verification routes, each with conditions. Here they are, with the cost of getting it wrong.

The three real routes

That last condition is the one that eliminates most people, and it is rarely stated plainly.

Route one: your own EIN

The fastest source is the CP 575 notice, the letter the IRS mailed when the EIN was first assigned.

It is worth more than a number. The CP 575 shows the EIN alongside the exact legal name recorded in the IRS master file. That pairing is what banks, payment processors and counterparties actually need, because a mismatch between the name you use and the name the IRS holds is what causes rejections.

Lost it? The IRS Business and Specialty Tax line can confirm your own EIN to an authorised person. They will not confirm anyone else's.

Practical point for non-US founders: the name on your CP 575 is the name to reproduce exactly on W-9s, bank applications and platform onboarding. Not the trading name, not a shortened version. Exactly.

Route two: Form W-9

If you pay a US business and will report those payments, the W-9 is the mechanism.

The payee certifies their name and TIN. You keep the form. It is the documentary basis for what you later put on an information return.

A W-9 is a certification, not a verification. The payee is telling you the number. It becomes a verification only when you check it against IRS records, which is route three.

Route three: IRS TIN Matching

This is the only route that checks a name and number against IRS records, and it is free.

What it does. Confirms whether a name and TIN combination matches IRS records, before you file your year end information returns.

Who can use it. Any payer who has filed at least one information return in either of the two prior tax years. Access runs through the IRS e-Services portal, after completing electronic registration and authentication.

The two modes.

What it does not do. It does not tell you an EIN belongs to a business you name. You must supply both the name and the number, and it tells you whether they match. There is no reverse lookup and no search by name.

When none of the three routes is open

You are checking a counterparty you do not pay, or you have never filed an information return. There is no IRS route. But there are three partial substitutes.

SEC EDGAR, for public companies. Registrants file their IRS Employer Identification Number on filing cover pages. If the company is SEC-reporting, the number is there and it is free.

IRS Tax Exempt Organization Search, for non-profits. Exempt organisations are searchable by name, and their EINs are public. Form 990 returns carry the number too. This is the one genuinely public EIN database, and it covers only the exempt sector.

The state register, for existence. An EIN is a federal tax identifier and proves nothing about whether an entity legally exists. Existence is a state question. For a Delaware entity, that is the Delaware entity search, which is free.

What it costs to get it wrong

This is why the check exists, and it belongs before the how-to rather than after it.

The B notice. A name and TIN mismatch on an information return triggers a notice from the IRS requiring you to correct it.

Backup withholding at 24%. If the mismatch is not resolved in time, you must begin withholding a flat 24% of future payments to that vendor or contractor. You are then holding back a quarter of what you owe a supplier, and explaining why.

Penalties per form. Failure to file correct information returns carries penalties that scale with how late the correction is, in a range that has recently run from around $60 to $310 per form. Intentional disregard is far worse: around $630 per form, or 10% of the amount that should have been reported, whichever is greater.

These amounts are indexed and change annually. Treat them as an order of magnitude and confirm the current figures.

On a hundred contractor payments, a systematic name mismatch stops being an administrative detail very quickly. That is the case for running TIN Matching in November rather than discovering the problem in February.

Why the US is the outlier

This article closes a series on six company registers, and the American position is worth stating plainly.

Every other jurisdiction in this series lets you check a tax identifier against a public service. The United States does not, and the state that dominates US incorporation also publishes no owners at all.

That is not an accident, and it is not a scandal either. It is a design choice with consequences: due diligence on a US counterparty relies on documents the counterparty gives you, rather than on registers you can query yourself.

Plan for it. Ask for the CP 575 early, collect W-9s at onboarding rather than at year end, and do not budget time for a lookup that does not exist.

The summary