An acquired business registers the details it filed taxes under

The requirementstatement

Where the business has been acquired, the brand must carry the company information used for tax reporting at the time — not the acquirer's.

Severityseverity: HighHIGHRejected by at least one carrier or provider, and a common cause of failure at the rest.
When it bitesphase: Gates approvalapprovalGet this wrong and the brand or campaign is refused at registration.
What is checkedobject: brand.company_name + brand.ein
Where it liveslayer: BrandBRAND
How Ekas settles itdetectability: Human checkHUMAN; Only someone holding the document or making the call can settle it. Ekas tells you exactly what to look at.
What the fix involvesfailureClass: Supply evidenceTERMINAL_EVIDENCE; Needs proof only you hold: a screenshot, a recording, a scan of the form people signed.
Who requires itauthorities: HighLevel
When it appliesapplicabilityText: Applies to every 10DLC registration.

Why this rule existsrationale

After an acquisition the operating business keeps trading under its own name while its paperwork moves to the parent, and whoever fills in the registration reaches for the current org chart. Vetting looks up the EIN that actually filed, so the parent's name against the subsidiary's EIN — or the reverse — verifies as a mismatch. It is one of the few brand failures where both names are genuinely the company.

How to fix itremediation

Establish which entity filed the most recent federal return for this business and register that name and that EIN together. If the acquisition consolidated the tax filing under the parent, register the parent; if the subsidiary still files separately, register the subsidiary. Done when the name and the EIN come from the same return.

A compliant exampleexample

company_name: Acme Coffee Co, LLC with EIN 12-3456789 — the entity that filed, even where the parent now owns it

Check this yourselfattestation

No tool can settle this one for you. Here is the check, and what wrong looks like.

Which entity filed the most recent federal tax return for this business — and are the name and the EIN on this brand both taken from that return?

1Ask the finance team, not the org chart: after an acquisition the operating business keeps trading under its own name while the filing may have moved to the parent.
2Take the legal name and the EIN from the same return. Never one from each side of the deal.

What wrong looks like: The parent's name against the subsidiary's EIN. Both are genuinely the company, and the lookup returns a mismatch that reads like a typo.

Notesnotes

Off-platform: nothing on the form says an acquisition happened. The user has to answer this themselves by asking their finance team which entity filed the last federal return, and then take BOTH the name and the EIN from that return rather than mixing one from each side of the deal.

Rules you will hit next

One other rule reads brand.company_name + brand.ein. Fixing one field to satisfy a single rule is how a resubmission trades one rejection for another, so read these before you change anything.

BRD-002Legal name must match the IRS record for the EINBlockingBLOCKING BRD-006Submit every name line above the address on a multi-line IRS recordHighHIGH BRD-007TCR takes only the first line of the IRS-registered nameHighHIGH BRD-010Take the legal name from the CP-575 or 147C, never a W-2 or W-9HighHIGH BRD-027EIN must be old enough to have propagated to IRS recordsHighHIGH BRD-034Validate a non-US identifier against its home register before submittingHighHIGH

All brand rules

BRD-014 is one of 196 brand rules in the 915-rule 10DLC registry. Free to cite under CC BY 4.0.