Dear Agatha,
If I remember it correctly, US Employer Identification Numbers cannot be issued by the IRS in the United States for foreign government-owned organisations, since that would amount to one country paying taxes to another country (wars have been started for lesser reasons...). For this reason, and in order to have an applicant organization identifier, the NIH issues its own EIN numbers for foreign institutions; those are the ones that ends with an "A1", but they can only be used towards the NIH, not in any other situation (including other federal funders).
If ETH has both kinds of numbers, I would ask the prime awardee, and if they cannot answer, try to get in touch with NIH's OER.
Please be aware that I am writing this out of my memory, so it should be checked first.
Have a pleasant weekend, with or without EIN's...
Olaf
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Olaf Svenningsen
Head of Research Support Office\/ Chair of DARMA
University of Southern Denmark
DK-5000 Odense C
456-550-3374
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Original Message:
Sent: 10-31-2014 06:24
From: Agatha Keller
Subject: EIN Number on Attachment 3B
Dear Colleagues,
at the moment we struggle with EIN numbers and would very much appreciate your input:
There seem to be two numbers which are called EIN numbers and which look different:
either 9 digit numbers like xx-xxxxxxx (Employer Identification Number or TIN ) or
numbers that have 12 characters in total, 10 numbers followed by A1 which look as follows xxxxxxxxxxA1 (Entity Identification Number?).
We received the first one when registering with IRS, as the second one was issued when registering for the PMS.
Which of these two numbers has to be entered in the Attachment 3B - Research Subaward Agreement Subrecipient Contact form in the field "EIN No"?
Best regards from Zurich,
Agatha
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Agatha Keller
Co-Director EU GrantsAccess
ETH Zurich | University of Zurich
Zurich
414-463-45350
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