Question - What is TIN Matching?
Answer - TIN Matching is a pre-filing service only offered to payers and/or their authorized agents who submit information returns. It enables validation of TIN and name combinations prior to submission of the information return to the Internal Revenue Service (IRS).
Question - Why should I do it?
Answer – The IRS will levy and enormous penalty on you for any and every information return submitted to them with a missing or incorrect Tin/Name match.
On September 27, 2010 President Obama signed the "Small Business Jobs Act" H.R. 5297 into law. Section 2102 more than doubled the penalties for 1099 Series Forms starting in 2011. This includes late filings, mis-matched TaxID/Name combinations, missing SSNs, failure to e-File, and much more etc.
To avoid those penalties, we can perform a TIN/Name match on your behalf for a fee of $74 for up to 10,000 names. By performing this action, it can also help you mitigate or abate any potential penalty imposed by the IRS by showing a good faith attempt to gather the correct information. Please see the “Reasonable Cause” section of Publication 1586 for more information.
Just submit an Excel spreadsheet with the name (in one column with the column header 'name' or two columns with 'first name' and 'last name' as titles) and TIN/SSN. Other data can be included but all we need is the name and TIN/SSN. The information can be in any order – computers are great at just taking the information it needs.
We convert the data into the approved IRS format, submit to the IRS, and we receive the verified data back from the IRS usually within a few hours, but it could take as long as 48 hours. Then the data is converted into an easy to read format as seen below.
This report gives you the IRS error codes and whether the number does or does not match the name submitted. The IRS will NOT give you the corrected information. At this point you must contact the individual or company and request a corrected W9.
Another service we can provide is a W9 solicitation which complies with the IRS requirements per Pub 1586. By performing a TIN match and a W9 solicitation you may meet the requirements for the Reasonable Cause defense against the delayed Tier 3 penalty notice. Please click here to learn more. If you are interested in this service, please include addresses in your file upload and call us (361) 884-1500 for a quote.
Our Service Bureau can take over the task of printing, mailing and e-filing for a fee. Let us help you.
