BUSINESS TAX REGISTRATION CERTIFICATE

General

Every person who engages in any business within the city of Los Angeles is required to obtain the necessary Business Tax Registration Certificate(s) (BTRC) and make payment of the business tax to the City of Los Angeles Office of Finance (OOF). Please visit the OOF website for more information at http://www.lacity.org/finance. The Los Angeles Department of Building and Safety (LADBS) e-Permit System (e-Permit) requires licensed contractors to record their BTRC number as part of their registration information. This BTRC # is verified within the e-Permit business process each time a contractor attempts to obtain a permit. In November 2004, OOF will implement a new BTRC computer system known as "LATAX" that replaces an existing legacy system known as "TAPS". LATAX will adopt new business rules for the format of the business license number. Until all business licenses are renewed via LATAX, people with existing TAPS based business licenses will have the old BTRC # format while all newly issued LATAX based business licenses will have the new BTRC # format. During this period of time, e-Permit will allow contractors to enter either the old format if they have an existing TAPS based business license or the new format if they have a new or renewed LATAX based business license. The rules for entering the BTRC # into e-Permit are documented in the next section.

Entering a BTRC # into e-Permit

Existing TAPS based business license numbers have the format,

0123456-78
New LATAX based business license numbers will have the format,

0000123456-0001-9
In either case, all that is needed by e-Permit are the numeric digits, either with or without leading zeros, before the first (or only) hyphen. Therefore, the following numbers can be entered for either of the two business license examples above,

123456 or 0123456 or 00123456 or 000123456 or 0000123456
e-Permit will automatically convert the business license number entered into the new LATAX format (i.e. 0000123456) for validation against the LATAX business license master file as all existing TAPS based business license numbers will be automatically converted into the new LATAX format during a data conversion process associated with the LATAX system implementation.