Letter 147C: How to Get IRS Written Verification of Your EIN

Letter 147C is the IRS's written re-issue of an Employer Identification Number that has already been assigned to your entity. The IRS instructs the caller who has lost the original confirmation notice to "Call our business and specialty tax line. Request Letter 147C, EIN Previously Assigned."^[2] The letter is not a new EIN. It is documentary proof of the one your business already holds.

An EIN is "a 9-digit number (for example, 12-3456789) assigned to employers, sole proprietors, corporations, partnerships, estates, trusts, certain individuals, and other entities for tax filing and reporting purposes."^[1] A bank, a merchant processor, a payroll provider, an insurance carrier, or a foreign withholding agent will not open the account, cut the check, or process the vendor certification without confirming that number in writing. Letter 147C is the document the IRS created to fill exactly that gap, and it is the only way most businesses replace a lost confirmation notice after the fact.

The CP 575 is what the IRS mails or displays on-screen at the moment your EIN is first assigned. It is issued once, and the IRS does not reprint it. A photocopy passed around a filing cabinet for years is what most businesses eventually cannot find. The IRS now states that "Eligible Business Tax Account users can download a digital CP575, Employer Identification Number Verification Notice in BTA."^[3] When the entity qualifies for a Business Tax Account, that route is faster than a phone call. When it does not qualify, Letter 147C is the equivalent proof of the same EIN.

Both documents show the entity's legal name, the address on file, and the EIN. Both are accepted by every bank and withholding agent that asks for the EIN letter. The choice between them is procedural, not substantive: the CP 575 is one-time and the 147C is available at any time, for the life of the EIN, to any entity whose responsible party can be verified. That is why the online EIN application closes with the instruction to "Print your EIN confirmation letter for your records."^[11] Print the original once and treat it like a passport. Every replacement afterward comes through the 147C door.

The request rarely comes from the IRS itself. It comes from a third party that has decided the one-time confirmation notice is not enough or does not exist in its file. In our practice the request appears in four recurring places.

Banks and brokerages ask for it when the account was opened years ago against a photocopy the compliance team can no longer locate, and refuse further transactions until a fresh IRS document is in the folder. Payroll providers ask for it before running the first payroll, because a rejected employment-tax remittance costs the provider its own money. Foreign withholding agents paying a U.S. LLC ask for it alongside their own tax-certification paperwork, because the payer's diligence file has to match the IRS record if it is audited. And a successor buyer in an acquisition insists on the 147C at closing so the acquired EIN is on the same footing as everything else that changed hands. The small business accounting engagements we take on almost always begin with pulling one of these letters before anything else on the books gets touched.

By phone. The IRS's own guidance for EIN questions points to the Business and Specialty Tax Line at 800-829-4933 (TTY 800-829-4059).^[4] Most of the call is the identity verification that happens before the assistor confirms the EIN. Have the entity's legal name, the exact mailing address the IRS has on file (the current one, not the historical one), the entity's date of formation, and the responsible party's name and Social Security number or ITIN in front of you before you dial.

Once the caller is verified, the assistor confirms the EIN verbally. If you ask, the IRS will fax Letter 147C to a number you provide during the call, usually while the call is still open, or mail it to the address on file. Fax is faster and is what most requesters ask for. The mailed version can take several weeks to arrive. Neither channel accepts email delivery, and no online self-service form exists for a 147C. Keep the fax cover sheet, because banks and payroll providers routinely file it alongside the letter as proof of receipt.

The IRS releases Letter 147C only to a person it can tie to the entity's account. On the EIN application, "you must name the person in charge of the entity and its assets, called the responsible party."^[5] That responsible party, along with an officer of a corporation, a partner in a partnership, and a sole proprietor of an unincorporated business, can call directly.

Everyone else needs written authorization. A tax representative acting on your behalf calls the same 800-829-4933 line, but the IRS will not read the EIN off the account until a valid Power of Attorney or Tax Information Authorization is on record for that tax matter. A bookkeeper, an outside representative, or a formation-agent employee is a third party by default and gets nothing without that authorization in place. For business owners who have a professional handling federal correspondence, filing the authorization in advance turns a long verification call into a short one.

The path depends on where the business's principal place of business sits. A foreign-owned Florida LLC managed from Miami is a U.S. entity with a U.S. address, so the responsible party or an authorized representative uses the standard 800-829-4933 line described above.

A foreign entity with no U.S. principal place of business is different. The IRS routes those callers to a separate international line. Applicants whose principal place of business is outside the United States apply for or verify an EIN by phone at 267-941-1099, on weekdays from 6 a.m. to 11 p.m. Eastern time.^[8] The same line handles Letter 147C requests for an EIN previously assigned to a foreign entity. Two practical realities apply. The international line has one queue for every foreign business caller, so plan for real hold times. And the IRS requires the caller's name to match either the responsible party of record or the third-party designee named on the original SS-4, which for many offshore-owned entities is the U.S. accountant or agent who handled the formation, not the offshore owner. When a foreign owner reaches the queue without either of those roles, the call ends without a letter. This is one of the reasons entities running through our foreign-owned LLC tax filing work and our foreign-owned U.S. entity tax services engagements keep the responsible party and the authorization documents current from the start.

That happens more often than it should. The person who signed the original SS-4, whether a formation agent, a first business partner, or a prior officer, is often still the responsible party of record years after the founder took over. The IRS will not release Letter 147C to a caller who is not that person or an authorized third party, and it will not update the responsible-party record over the phone.

The fix is Form 8822-B. The About Form SS-4 page states plainly: "Keep the Form SS-4 information current. Use Form 8822-B to report changes to your responsible party, address or location."^[9] The deadline is a hard rule, not a suggestion: "Changes in responsible parties must be reported to the IRS within 60 days."^[9] A missed deadline does not carry a stated dollar penalty, but the IRS will refuse the 147C until the update processes, and that can take weeks after the form reaches the service center. If you have not confirmed who the IRS shows as your responsible party since the entity was formed, do that first. Our BOI reporting for foreign companies guide walks through the parallel FinCEN reporting rule that also depends on knowing who your responsible party is, which is often the setting in which this discrepancy surfaces.

The tempting shortcut when the phone-verification process feels heavy is to open the online EIN tool and file a fresh SS-4. Do not do that. The IRS will let you: "You can apply for only 1 EIN per responsible party per day."^[10] The tool will hand back a new number the same afternoon. But a second EIN for the same entity creates two separate IRS accounts for one taxpayer, which cascades into duplicate payroll-tax mismatches, duplicate information returns, wage remittances split between accounts, and a state sales-tax or Sunbiz filing tied to the wrong number.

The cleanup for a duplicate EIN is worse than the wait for a 147C. You have to close one of the two accounts by written request, and until it is closed the payroll provider, the bank, and the state each have to be told separately which number is current. When a client comes to our new business formation engagement holding two EINs for one entity, the first week of the engagement is spent unwinding the second application. A separate IRS rule matters here as well: "You need a new EIN, in general, when you change your entity's ownership or structure."^[7] Reissuing an EIN because the original confirmation notice cannot be found is not on that list.