Digital certificates bind digital information to physical identities and provide non-repudiation and data integrity. Before you begin the IDES enrollment process, each entity should obtain one valid digital certificate issued by an approved certificate authority (CA). IDES stores your public key and related digital certificate. IDES only recognizes and accepts digital certificates issued by IRS approved certificate authorities, listed below.
The IRS Public Key is a certificate that can be downloaded from the IDES Enrollment site. The public certificate should be included in the FATCA data packet (transmission archive) to the IRS.
Note: The public/private key pairs used for encryption for FATCA filings have an expiration date. The IRS Public Key for FATCA filing will expire soon. The IRS has a new key and will replace the existing key on October 13, 2023. After October 13, you will need to download the new IRS Public Key from IDES to file your FATCA Reports.
Supported formats for the digital certificate are:
IDES will convert digital certificates received in DER format to Base64 for storage and retrieval.
OV SSL Certificate Standard
EV SSL Certificate EV Multi-Domain
TrustID Server Standard SSL
FATCA Organization Certificate