It was recently announced that the DUNS number and its processes will be abolished in December of 2020, a Unique Entity Identifier (UEI) will be its replacement. In the past Dun & Bradstreet provided an assigned number identifying a business and its core information. Now Ernst & Young will be issuing businesses their identifying numbers via System for Award Management (SAM).
Businesses that currently hold a DUNS number will be transitioned to the system and issued an UEI for use in the future. New businesses will be required to register within SAM to be issued an UEI.
The current technical specifications for the UEI are as follows:
The UEI is stored as a 12-character, alpha-numeric value within databases and passed as such within interfaces and extracts. This 12-character value will adhere to the following rules:
- The letters “O” and “I” will not be used to avoid confusion with zero and one.
- The first character will not be zero to avoid cutting off digits that can occur during data imports, for example, when importing data into spreadsheet programs.
- Nine-digit sequences will not be used in the identifier to avoid collision with the nine-digit DUNS number or Taxpayer Identification Number (TIN).
- The first five characters will be structured to avoid collision with the Commercial and Government Entity code formatting or CAGE code.
- The UEI will not be case sensitive.
- The final character will be a checksum of the first 11 characters. Checksums are used to detect errors within data.
- The UEI will not contain the entity’s Electronic Funds Transfer (EFT) Indicator. The EFT Indicator will remain a separate field in SAM.gov.
- Today the “EFT Indicator” in SAM.gov is labeled “DUNS+4”.
- The DUNS+4 field in SAM.gov is used to identify additional bank accounts associated with a single SAM.gov registration. The DUNS+4 is a separate field from the DUNS field in SAM.gov.
- The DUNS+4 is not provided by D&B but is determined by the entity during registration.
- Soon, the DUNS+4 field name in SAM.gov will be re-labeled to “EFT Indicator” to align with regulations. The DUNS+4 data provided by entities in that field will not change with the re-labeling.
- Additionally, when a new UEI is assigned to an entity registration in SAM.gov, the existing EFT Indicator data will not change.
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