Why did a search show a TIN error first and then validate later?

The IRS TIN matching service was unavailable when the search ran, so the search completed with a null TIN result and a warning, and was then retried automatically.

When the retry succeeded, the search was updated and a BusinessSearch.updated webhook was sent. If your integration only reads the first response, it will keep the stale result. Consume BusinessSearch.updated, or re-fetch the search by ID, so the corrected result flows through.

Here is our complete guide for how to handle IRS outages - which are the main reason for this scenario.