Question about Tax Exemption Status check

[Semper Fidelis]

I need some help from any with expertise in this area to clear up some confusion I have.

Yesterday I was setting up a nonprofit account with an email service for a local Church and asked for their tax exempt EIN. The registration failed which led me to search to see whether the EIN was valid.

The IRS website has a nonprofit exemption checker here: http://www.irs.gov/Charities-&-Non-Profits/Exempt-Organizations-Select-Check

Not only could I not find the EIN they gave me but I couldn't even find my Church's EIN. I even looked for other Churches in our area and couldn't find them either. I even tried using their tool to see if ours had been automatically revoked but I couldn't find it using any search criteria.

When I searched using some other sites that seem to track valid nonprofits I could find our Church but not the other one.

I guess my question is whether the IRS list is the only list of valid nonprofits because other public databases that supposedly track valid nonprofits have many more listings and verification from the email service worked for our Church even though it is not found at the IRS site.

 

[ooguyx]

Churches don't have to register as 501c3s with the IRS for tax exempt status or for contributions to them to be deductible. Generally, churches get an EIN so that they can report payroll and pay payroll taxes. There are scenarios where churches won't have an EIN, but should be rare and limited to small churches.

You can be assured that if the organization is a church, they are in fact tax exempt. And since they don't need to file for exempt status with the IRS they won't be listed in that database. If they do register (which is fine) they will be on that database with the IRS.