Owner Identifiers by Country

An application's owners can be people or companies, and they can live in the United States, Canada, China or Mexico. Each country identifies its people and companies differently, so an owner's identifiers are spread across three fields. This page says what each field is for and which identifier every country uses.

Applications themselves are accepted from US businesses only for now. The countries below apply to the owners of a US business.

The three fields

taxInfo — tax identifiers, for a person or a company. A person carries the national id their country issues them as a tax id, such as a US Social Security Number. A company carries its business tax id, such as a US Employer Identification Number. Each entry names its type, the issuing country and the number.

identification — for people only. A national identity number that is not a tax id, such as a Mexican CURP. A business owner never carries one. It is sent to CLP as the person's identification data.

registrationNumber — for business owners only. The company's number in its country's business registry, such as a Canadian Business Incorporation Number. It is not a tax id: a Chinese company's Unified Social Credit Code goes here, and nowhere else.

Which identifier each country uses

Owner	taxInfo	identification	registrationNumber
US person	SSN (ssn), required	—	—
Canadian person	SIN (sin), required	—	—
Chinese person	Resident Identity Card number (cn_id), required	—	—
Mexican person	—	CURP (curp), required	—
US company	EIN (ein), optional	—	—
Canadian company	Business Number (bn), optional	—	BIN, optional
Chinese company	—	—	USCC, optional
Mexican company	RFC (rfc), optional	—	—

A dash means the field is refused for that owner: a Mexican person sends no taxInfo, a Chinese company sends no taxInfo and no person sends a registrationNumber. A company's tax id is optional because the applicant may not know the numbers of a company that owns part of their business.

Formats

Spaces and hyphens may be sent in any of these numbers, and letters may be in either case. Each is stored in one form:

Identifier	Stored as
SSN	XXX-XX-XXXX
SIN	XXX-XXX-XXX
EIN	XX-XXXXXXX
Business Number	nine digits
Resident Identity Card number	18 characters, the last a digit or X
RFC	12 characters: 3 letters, a date, 3 letters or digits
CURP	18 characters
BIN	5-10 letters or digits
USCC	18 characters

The Resident Identity Card number, the CURP and the USCC end in a check character, and a number whose check character does not match is refused.

Reading them back

Every entry carries a maskedNumber with only its last group visible. The full number of a person's taxInfo and identification is returned only to callers with the owner PII permission; others get an empty list. A business's taxInfo is returned to any caller. On the public apply-session types, number is always null and only maskedNumber is given.

The deprecated ssn and ein

ssn and ein still work for a US or Canadian owner and stay in step with taxInfo. They hold a US or Canadian id only, and are refused for an owner in China or Mexico. Send taxInfo or the deprecated field in a request, not both. A value sent in either field replaces that id, and any id the owner's country does not issue is removed with it.

Changing an owner's country

An identifier belongs to the country that issued it, so moving an owner who has one on file to another country needs the new country's identifier in the same request. A request that changes the country and sends none is refused rather than keeping the old one. Send the new identifier as a whole taxInfo list, or as identification for a person moving to Mexico, so that nothing from the old country is left beside it. A person's CURP is removed when they move out of Mexico.