I have a customer whose legal title is 42 characters long (47 with spaces). The E-filing system only allows for 30 characters. Filing without the full name could result in an exam finding.

What do I do?

Type as much as you can, that's all you can do. We have some businesses like that and we type as far as the e-form will let us. SARs too but we're able to expand in the narrative.

If I'm not mistaken, they only match the TIN or EIN with the first so many characters of the customer's name. Unless the CTR comes back for a name mismatch, you should have no problems just using up as many characters as you can. You could run into a problem if you would try to abbreviate the first part of the name in an attempt to try to make it fit though.

Thomas J is correct, they use the IRS matching system. It "matches" to the first four characters of the last name. From my perspective, the option of typing until you run out of spaces is the only option available. However, I would have a note in the file indicating I had talked to the Helpdesk and they had confirmed my analyis.