What the registry is checking
Every standard 10DLC brand carries a legal company name and a tax ID. For a US business the tax ID is the employer identification number, and the registry’s verification step asks one question: does this EIN belong to a business with this exact legal name? Twilio’s own wording for error 30799 is that “for US companies, the EIN must match the legal company name exactly as registered.” The comparison is against the name the IRS assigned when the EIN was issued, not the name on the website, the storefront, or the state filing.
This is the same name the IRS uses everywhere else: on the CP 575 notice that came with the EIN, on Letter 147C, and in the name control the IRS matches 1099s against. A business that has ever had a 1099 bounce for a name/TIN mismatch will fail 10DLC for the same reason, and vice versa.
The check happens after the customer has already waited on the submission, so every failure costs a resubmission cycle.
The four mismatches
Almost every unverifiable brand comes down to one of these.
| What the customer entered | What the IRS has | Why |
|---|---|---|
| The trade name or DBA (“Sunrise Plumbing”) | The legal entity (“Sunrise Home Services LLC”) | The EIN was issued to the entity. The DBA is a state or county registration the IRS does not key on. |
| The entity name without its suffix (“Acme Roofing”) | “Acme Roofing Inc” or “Acme Roofing LLC” | The suffix is part of the legal name. Exact match means exact. |
| The name on the Secretary of State record | A different spelling or an older name | Businesses amend state filings and forget to tell the IRS, or they told the IRS and never updated the state. The registry follows the IRS. |
| An SSN, or an EIN that belongs to a different entity | Nothing, or another company | A sole proprietor entered a Social Security number (Twilio flags this explicitly), or the customer used the EIN of a parent, a prior company, or a payroll provider. |
A fifth, rarer case: the entity is real and the name is right, but the EIN is new. IRS records take a few weeks to propagate after an EIN is issued online, and a brand submitted in that window can fail even though everything is correct. Wait and resubmit.
How to find the legal name behind an EIN
The customer usually has it and does not know where. In order of reliability:
- The CP 575 notice. The letter the IRS mailed when the EIN was assigned. The name on it is the name to use, character for character.
- Letter 147C. The replacement if the CP 575 is lost. The business owner or an authorized person calls the IRS Business & Specialty Tax Line and the IRS faxes or mails it. Our Letter 147C page walks through the call.
- A filed return. The name block on the most recent Form 941, 1120, 1120-S or 1065, or the name a payroll provider files under.
- An EIN-to-name lookup. TIN Comply, which publishes this site, keeps a database of 150 million EIN-to-legal-name records built to match the way the IRS keys names. Enter the EIN and it returns the legal name; enter the EIN and the name the customer gave you and it tells you whether they agree. See the company name lookup by EIN documentation.
What does not work: searching the Secretary of State site (it gives the state name, which may differ), guessing at suffixes, or asking the customer to “check their paperwork” without saying which paperwork.
Fixing a failed brand
The mechanics differ by provider but the sequence is the same: correct the legal name and EIN on the customer or business profile, then resubmit the brand. On Twilio the profile is edited in the Console or through the API, the failed brand is deleted or updated, and it is resubmitted. Three self-service resubmissions are free; beyond that, a manual appeal carries a $10 fee on top of the normal brand fee, and each resubmission is charged by the registry ecosystem, so getting the name right before the first attempt is worth real money on a platform with hundreds of customers.
Two things to check before resubmitting, because they cause the same error: the company type (a business coded as government or nonprofit when it is not, or a nonprofit missing its 501(c) subsection), and, for public companies, the stock exchange and ticker.
Sole proprietors
A sole proprietor without an EIN should not be registered as a standard brand at all. Entering the owner’s SSN in the tax-ID field fails verification and is flagged specifically (“the EIN you submitted appears to be a US SSN”). The sole-proprietor brand type exists for this case, with its own limits on daily volume and number of phone numbers. If the customer wants standard-brand throughput, the answer is to obtain an EIN from the IRS (free, online, a few minutes) and register with it once IRS records have caught up.
For platforms: check before you submit
If you register customers on their behalf, the failures land on your support queue and your resubmission bill. The fix is to verify the EIN and legal name at the point the customer types them, before the brand is created:
- Look up the legal name for the EIN the customer entered and show it back to them (“the IRS has this EIN under Sunrise Home Services LLC; register the brand under that name?”).
- Reject nine-digit numbers that are structurally an SSN and route the customer to the sole-proprietor path or to getting an EIN.
- Where the customer gives an EIN and a name that do not agree, hold the submission until one of them is corrected instead of letting it fail at the registry.
- Keep the verified name on the customer record so campaign registrations, invoices and any 1099 you issue to that customer all carry the same name.
An EIN-to-name lookup runs in well under a second and costs cents, against a resubmission cycle that costs a support ticket, a registry fee and a customer who cannot send for days.
Questions people ask
Does the registry check the EIN against the IRS in real time?
The registry and its vetting partners verify the EIN and legal name against government tax records as part of brand verification. The exact data path is not published, but the practical rule is the one Twilio states: the EIN must match the legal company name exactly as registered with the IRS.
My company name has an ampersand, apostrophe or accent. Will it fail?
Enter it the way the IRS has it. The IRS name-control rules keep ampersands and hyphens and drop most other punctuation, so “Smith & Jones LLC” should be entered with the ampersand. If the IRS letter shows it one way, use that.
We changed our name. Which one do we register?
The name the IRS has now. If you filed the name change with the IRS, use the new name; if you only changed it with the state, the IRS still has the old one and the brand must use it until the IRS is updated (a letter to the IRS, or the name-change box on the next return).
Can a platform look up a customer’s EIN from the company name?
Name-to-EIN discovery exists but is a sensitive capability; TIN Comply provides it only to accounts that have passed a business review, because an EIN is used to open accounts and file returns. The safer, unrestricted path is the other direction: the customer supplies the EIN, the lookup confirms the legal name.
Is this the same problem as a 1099 name/TIN mismatch?
Yes. The IRS compares the same EIN to the same name for 1099 filing, and a business whose brand fails 10DLC is a business whose 1099s would come back on a CP2100. Fixing the name once fixes both. See how the IRS builds the name control.