Validate a non-US identifier against its home register before submitting

The requirementstatement

A non-US registration identifier should be confirmed against the issuing country's official register before it is submitted.

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.ein
Where it liveslayer: BrandBRAND
How Ekas settles itdetectability: External recordEXTERNAL_DATA; The fact that settles it lives in a register we cannot query, such as the IRS file, a postal database, or another provider’s tenant. Reported as a warning with the evidence to check, not as a pass.
What the fix involvesfailureClass: Wait on someone elseTERMINAL_EXTERNAL; Needs an external system or a waiting period, such as IRS propagation, a vetting result, or a carrier queue.
Who requires itauthorities: HighLevel
When it appliesapplicabilityText: Applies to every 10DLC registration.

Why this rule existsrationale

A foreign brand only gets a few automated attempts before it lands in the appeal queue, and an identifier that is stale, superseded or transcribed wrongly burns one of them for no reason. The home register is free to search and authoritative, which makes this the cheapest five minutes in the whole non-US registration path.

How to fix itremediation

Look the number up before submitting: VIES for an EU VAT number, ABN Lookup for Australia, NZBN for New Zealand, the Companies Registry for Hong Kong, Companies House for the UK. Done when the register returns your company, spelled the way you are about to submit it.

Check this yourselfattestation

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

Did you look this identifier up in the issuing country's official register, and copy the legal name back from what the register returned?

1Search the authoritative register: VIES for an EU VAT number, ABN Lookup for Australia, NZBN for New Zealand, the Companies Registry for Hong Kong, Companies House for the UK.
2Copy the company name from the register's result, not from your letterhead. That is the name the vetting provider compares against.

What wrong looks like: A number that is stale, superseded, or transcribed one digit wrong burns one of the few automated attempts a non-US brand gets before it lands in the appeal queue.

Notesnotes

We cannot reach these registers. The user runs the lookup themselves and, crucially, copies the legal name back from the register rather than from their letterhead — the name the register holds is the one the vetting provider will compare against.

Rules you will hit next

6 other rules read 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-017A tax ID is required for every entity but a sole proprietorBlockingBLOCKING BRD-019EIN must be nine digitsBlockingBLOCKING BRD-020Submit the US EIN hyphenatedBlockingBLOCKING BRD-021An SSN is not a business registration numberBlockingBLOCKING BRD-022A DUNS number is not a US business registration numberBlockingBLOCKING BRD-032Submit the identifier in the form the issuing country requiresBlockingBLOCKING

All brand rules

BRD-034 is one of 196 brand rules in the 915-rule 10DLC registry. Free to cite under CC BY 4.0.