Compliancely review

What Compliancely actually does

Compliancely is a verification service from Zenwork, the company that also runs Tax1099. Its core job is answering a narrow question quickly: are this name and this tax identification number a matched pair on IRS records, and is the business or person behind them someone you can safely onboard and pay. It began as a standalone real-time TIN matching tool and has since widened into business entity searches, address validation, watchlist screening and tax risk reporting, all reachable from the same account.

Delivery is two-sided. There is a dashboard for people who run checks by hand or upload a file of them, and a REST API for teams that want verification sitting inside their own onboarding flow, with webhooks, retries and audit logs behind it. The company reports bulk TIN results returning in roughly two to three seconds. The data comes from direct sources rather than a resold aggregate: IRS records for TIN matching, Secretary of State databases for entity status, USPS for addresses, OFAC lists for sanctions, and the Death Master File for deceased identities. Zenwork puts annual volume above 75 million checks and names Payoneer, Grubhub, Panera and BDO among its customers.

Key features

The catalogue is a set of individual checks that can be run alone or bundled into a report.

• Real-time and bulk IRS TIN matching, with results in seconds instead of the wait a manual e-Services session imposes
• KYB business verification that combines entity status, registered address and watchlist hits into a single decision-ready report
• OFAC sanctions screening, Death Master File checks and FATCA classification monitoring for continuing review rather than one-time onboarding
• I-9 and employment eligibility verification, alongside income and employment verification for lending and HR use
• Individual and business tax risk reports built from IRS signals such as liens and levies, scored and combined with public records
• An enterprise API with webhooks, retries and audit logs, plus bulk file workflows for large vendor lists

Who it's for

The natural buyer is an accounting firm or AP team that pays a long tail of contractors and vendors and files 1099s for them. Filing a few hundred forms against unverified names and tax IDs is how a practice ends up with B-notices and penalty letters in the spring, and running the list through TIN matching in advance is the cheapest insurance available. The subscription tiers are sized for that: the entry plans cover a few dozen matches a month, which is a solo practitioner or a small firm's vendor file, not an enterprise commitment.

It is a poor fit for anyone whose vendors or hires sit outside the United States. Every high-value check here is anchored to a US data source, and there is no equivalent for a contractor in Poland or a supplier in Vietnam. Teams that want verification wired into NetSuite, Bill or a procurement system should also budget engineering time, because the only named product connection is to Tax1099.

How it compares

Middesk is the closest comparison on the KYB side, with strong developer documentation and a product built around business onboarding, but it is priced and positioned for funded fintechs rather than accounting practices. Persona and similar identity platforms offer broader international coverage and highly configurable verification flows, at the cost of a real implementation project. At the other end, single-purpose TIN checkers such as Sovos TINCheck do the one match cheaply and stop there, with no entity search, watchlist screening or risk reporting to grow into. Compliancely sits in the middle: narrower than the identity platforms, deeper than the single-check tools, and unusually well aimed at the 1099 calendar.

Verdict

For a US practice that touches vendor onboarding and information returns, this is a sensible and unglamorous piece of infrastructure. The TIN matching alone justifies an entry subscription, the API is credible enough to build against, and the surrounding checks mean one vendor instead of several. The caveat is scope. Half the platform, including the business and credit risk reports, is sold through a sales conversation with no published rates, and the whole thing is useless the moment your payee list goes international. Buy it for the US vendor file, not as a general identity layer.