I’m looking for some sort of service, or API, where I can confirm that a user who signs up for a business account actually owns business xyz. I though about doing this by EIN number, but not sure if that’s a good way… Any ideas?
First question, what is the target user and where are they from? Specific countries or globally?
A lot of web sites / web apps require a business domain email address to sign up. Gmail, outlook etc are blocked from being registered.
Right now it would only be USA.
This site provides info about an API that will return a JSON object based on an entity search for the States but I don’t think it contains owner information. We have a similar thing in Australia and it can be difficult to check the ownership particularly if it is a subsidiary company. You may need a commercial service to extract more info.
The problem you may face is how to verify whether the person is an owner of the business.
What is the context of the check? Are you checking that the user of your app is the owner or is this an unrelated search to check who owns the business?
Perhaps business ownership isn’t the correct level of authorization. You would just need to verify that you are a representative of the business with the proper credentials to sign up for my service. This is probably more of a legal issue that I’d need to consult with a lawyer to really get a solid answer.
I cannot think of way to check this delegation of authority programmatically, sorry not much help.
Something that may be useful is to allow the user to sign up and then you can manually set the enabled checkbox in the Users Table after confirming authority. This is an option in the Users Service.
Yes, that manual checking of boxes in a database is something I’d like to stay away from, need this to scale very quickly. Thanks for the suggestion though 
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