Canada Business Number

Detects Canada Revenue Agency (CRA) Business Numbers (BN). The core BN is nine digits assigned to a business. Program accounts append a two-letter program identifier (RC, RM, RP, or RT) and a four-digit reference, for example 123456789RC0001 for a corporate income-tax account.

Type

regex

Engine

boost_regex

Confidence

medium

Confidence justification

Medium confidence: nine-digit sequences are common; program-account suffixes improve precision but bare BN still requires CRA/business-number keywords to limit false positives.

Jurisdictions

ca

Regulations

PIPEDA, Law 25 (QC), Excise Tax Act (CA)

Frameworks

ISO 27001, ISO 27701

Data categories

business-identifier, financial, government-id

Scope

narrow

Risk rating

6

Platform compatibility

Purview: Compatible, GCP DLP: Compatible, Macie: Compatible, Zscaler: Compatible, Palo Alto: Compatible, Netskope: Unsupported

Pattern

\b\d{9}(?:\s?(?:RC|RM|RP|RT)\s?\d{4})?\b

Corroborative evidence keywords

business number, BN, CRA business number, program account, corporate number, マイナンバー, 法人, 法人番号, corporate identification, corporate my number, houjin bangou, my number, 会社法人等番号, 国税庁, 法人マイナンバー, 法人番号公表サイト, account number, bank account, banking, chequing (+46 more)

Proximity: 300 characters

Should match

• 123456789 — Bare nine-digit BN
• 123456789RC0001 — BN with RC corporate tax account
• 987654321 RT 0002 — BN with spaced RT GST/HST account

Should not match

• 12345678 — Only 8 digits
• 123456789RX0001 — Invalid program code RX
• 123456789RC000 — Only 3 digits in account reference

Known false positives

• Canadian SINs, phone fragments, or order IDs that are nine digits. Mitigation: Require business number / CRA / program account keywords; deprioritise when SIN keywords dominate.

References

• Business Number - Canada.ca

Collections

• Coverage Phase 1 Priority Identifiers