How does the IRS match EINs to business names?

The IRS does not publish its matching rules, and it does not tell us how closely a name matched. What we can say from experience:

• Punctuation, spacing, and capitalization do not matter. "ACME, Inc." and "acme inc" are treated the same.

• The beginning of the name carries the most weight. Two entities whose names start the same way, for example an Inc and an LLC with the same base name, can both match the same EIN.

• Entity suffixes and trailing words matter less than the leading words.

In practice this means a TIN match confirms the TIN belongs to a business with that name, but a close variant of the name may also match.