Business credit cards on an LLC with an EIN: I answered the wrong question for two years

For two years I answered this question with a list. Somebody would write and ask which card they could get on an LLC with no Social Security number, and I would send back four or five issuers that were said to take an ITIN, with a note about which ones had asked for a passport. People arrive at this letter searching for business credit cards for LLC with EIN, and that list is what I gave them.

The list was not wrong. It was the wrong shape, and I had it wrong for long enough that a few hundred people got the wrong answer from me. This is the corrected version, and it took an afternoon with a federal database to see why.

The question I was answering is “which issuer accepts my number”. The question that decides the outcome is “what does the identity layer behind that issuer see when it looks me up”, and those two are not the same question at all. I had been treating the second as a detail of the first.

What the agency that issues the number says about it

Start with the plainest source there is, and read it before you fill in a single application form. The IRS page on the individual taxpayer identification number opens by saying it is “a 9-digit number the IRS issues if you need a U.S. taxpayer identification number for federal tax purposes, but you aren't eligible for a Social Security number (SSN)”, and then states flatly that “an ITIN is issued by the IRS for federal tax purposes only”.

Underneath that sits a list of what the number does not do, and the fourth item is the one nobody quotes. An ITIN does not “serve as identification outside the federal tax system”. Not “is sometimes not accepted”, not “may be refused by some institutions”, but plainly not identification outside the tax system, written by the office that prints it.

The same list says the number does not qualify you for Social Security benefits, does not provide or change immigration status, and does not authorise you to work legally in the country. Those three I had read. The fourth I had skimmed past for years, and it is the one that explains every refusal I have watched.

What the complaint file says, which is not what I expected

So I went to the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau database and pulled every complaint in the twelve months to July that mentions an ITIN anywhere in the text. There were 163 of them. I expected a file about banks and card issuers, and that is not what came back.

Of the 163, 82 sit under credit reporting rather than under any bank product. Checking and savings accounts account for 37. Credit cards, the thing everybody is actually asking about, account for 23. Money transfer 8, debt collection 5, car finance 4, mortgages 2.

Then I sorted the same 163 by the company complained about, and that is where I stopped being annoyed at issuers, because the ranking that came back is not a ranking of banks at all, and it took me a second read to accept that the four names at the top of a file about getting a card were mostly companies that have never issued a card to anybody in their history.

TransUnion sits at the top with 24, Experian follows with 22, Capital One with 21 and Equifax with 20. Three of the four names at the top are not lenders at all, they are the credit bureaus, and only one of the four could issue you anything. Bank of America follows on 13, JPMorgan Chase on 11, PayPal on 9 and American Express on 6, and by then you are into single figures per company.

The problems people describe match the companies they name. Incorrect information on a report accounts for 35 complaints and being unable to get your own report or score at all accounts for 21. Another 17 are complaints about how a company investigated the first complaint, which is a category that only exists because the first round failed. Managing an account accounts for 14, closing one for 12, improper use of a report for 10, opening an account for 10. Getting a credit card, which is the query that brought most people to this page, accounts for 8.

Eight complaints out of 163, and that is the entire visible surface of the thing everybody searches for. Put it next to the 82 filed against the reporting side and the ratio is roughly ten to one, which is the whole argument of this letter compressed into one comparison, and it is the comparison I never ran in two years of answering the question by hand.

The number I keep coming back to

Of those 163 complaints, 138 closed with an explanation and nothing else. Another 23 closed with something fixed that was not money, a record corrected or a file unlocked. Money went back to the person complaining in 2 cases.

Two out of 163 works out at 1.2 per cent, against roughly 12 per cent across the whole complaint database in the same twelve months.

I would not read that as proof the complaints were unfounded. Most of them are not asking for money, they are asking for a record to be corrected, and a corrected record shows up in the non-monetary column. What the ratio does tell me is that filing a complaint is a poor tool here, and if your plan for a refusal is to escalate and wait, the file says that plan produces a polite letter.

The scale, which cuts both ways

One number keeps me honest about all of the above. In the same twelve months the Bureau logged 5,906,429 complaints under credit reporting, and 82 of them mention an ITIN. That is 0.0014 per cent. Against 84,217 complaints about checking and savings accounts, the 37 ITIN ones are 0.04 per cent.

So this is a small file. My suspicion is that 163 is small on a pair of counts at once, and only the first of them is good news. Some of it is that the problem is genuinely narrower than the search volume suggests. The rest, I would guess, is that people who cannot get a number recognised also do not reach the point of filing a federal complaint about it, because filing one requires an account, a company, a paper trail and the confidence that a regulator will read you. That is a guess with nothing behind it beyond the shape of the 163.

Either way, do not read 163 as “this rarely happens”. Read it as “163 people got far enough to put it in writing”.

One search, two different products

Here is the part I should have written two years ago instead of the list. I had assumed the search described one product, and it describes two.

The first question is whether a card can be issued to the company against the company, with no personal guarantee, underwriting on the entity and the EIN as the identifier. That product exists and it is usually a charge card rather than a revolving credit card. It wants a real balance or real revenue sitting somewhere it can see, and it does not care very much who you are personally, because it is not lending against you.

The second question is whether a card can be issued to you personally, with a personal guarantee, using an ITIN where the form asks for a Social Security number. That is a consumer credit decision wearing a business jacket. It runs on your consumer file, which is exactly the thing the 82 complaints are about.

Almost every “business credit cards for LLC with EIN” result on the internet answers the first question using material from the second, and that is why the advice you find reads as contradictory. Both halves are internally sensible and they describe different products, which is the sort of confusion that survives for years because nobody is wrong enough to be corrected.

Work out which one you are asking about before you read anything else, including this letter. If the company has money in an account and you want a card to spend it, you want the first. If the company has no revenue yet and you want credit, you want the second, and the second is where the identity layer decides.

The order I would go in now

Before you apply anywhere, ask what your own file looks like. That is free, it is your right, and it takes a week rather than a month. It is also the step I never told anybody to take, which is the correction this letter exists for.

If you have already been refused, keep the refusal letter. Under federal law an adverse action notice has to name the reporting company whose report was used and give you its contact details. That letter is the only free route to the file that decided the application, and it looks like a rejection, so people bin it.

Then request the file, read it, and dispute what is wrong in it. Thirty five of the 163 complaints are about exactly this, a record that does not match the person, and 23 of the 163 ended with something corrected, which is a low rate and not a zero one, and it is worth knowing that the correction, when it lands, lands on the file rather than on the application you already lost, so the benefit is to the next application and not to the one that hurt.

Only then apply, and apply to the product that matches your question. A card against company balances if the company has balances. A personal guarantee product if it does not, knowing that the file is what answers.

And keep the entity name identical everywhere. I have said this in three letters now and I will keep saying it, because a company that is “Marketti Studio LLC” at the state and “Marketti Studio, LLC” at the IRS produces two records that no automated check will reconcile, and the comma is free to fix before you apply and expensive afterwards.

A short digression about the word “accepts”

Something that has nothing to do with your application and that I keep chewing on.

Every guide on this subject, mine included, used the verb “accepts”. Which issuers accept an ITIN. It is a comfortable word because it puts the decision in one place, at a desk, where somebody could in principle be persuaded.

The complaint file does not describe a desk. It describes a lookup that returns nothing, or returns somebody else, and a person on the telephone who can see the result and not the reason. “Accepts” implies a judgement was made about you. Often no judgement was made about you at all, because nothing about you assembled in the first place.

It bothers me more than a word should. Anyway, back to the paperwork.

What I could not find out

I would like to tell you which issuers actually approve on an ITIN today and at what rate, and I cannot, because no issuer publishes it. I have not found a single underwriting policy on a public page in the 2 afternoons I gave this letter, and I am not going to build a ranking out of the handful of approvals that get posted on forums, because that is the most flattering sample in existence.

I also do not know how many of the 163 people in that file eventually got what they wanted. The database records how the company closed the matter, not what happened next, and “closed with explanation” covers both “we fixed it after you called again” and “we did nothing”.

What I can say is that the shape of the problem is not the shape of the search. People type a question about issuers and land in a file where most of the trouble sits with three companies that never issue anything to anybody, and if you had asked me in January which four names would come out on top of a search for ITIN complaints, I would have said four banks, and I would have been wrong about three of them.

None of this is tax or legal advice, and an unusual ownership structure or a US tax filing obligation you have not met changes what you should be doing entirely. That is a conversation for somebody who reads these professionally rather than for me.

One last figure, because it changes how you should read everything above. The 163 complaints cover twelve months and the whole country, and in that same window the Bureau took 5,906,429 complaints about credit reporting and 84,217 about checking and savings, which means the file I built this letter on is roughly one part in forty thousand of the reporting file. A letter built on 163 rows should be read as a description of a shape, not as a measurement of how often the shape occurs, and I would rather say that here than have somebody quote the 82 as a statistic about foreign founders.

It is a small file, and it is the only one there is.

The part I still think about is the eight. Eight complaints out of 163 are filed under getting a credit card, and that is the entire visible surface of a question that thousands of people search every month. Either the other people are not complaining, or they never got far enough into the process to have something to complain about. I do not know which of the 2 explanations is right, and the difference matters more than anything else here.