OMG...I got this working.  No thanks to tech support which simply has no clue about this.  All they could recommend was re-installing the software which does nothing.

I did two things.  I am not sure you need to do both of these.  The second "fix" may be enough to make this work for you.

In the COMMON folder for each year there are several files beginning with EIN that form the EIN database.  Most importantly, there is an EINDB.DBF and an EINDB.CDX.  Think of these two files as a working pair.  The DBF is the database and the CDX is the Index to the Database.

If these files are “broken” or corrupted somehow, reinstalling won’t accomplish anything because this file is not overwritten in the installation process—it better not be, it’s a data file.

Go to Tools . Options > Employer /Payer database and look at the database. 

You should see all of your employers there.  In my case, the database was there but it was not operational. 

In my case, the EINdatabase, was copied—BUT IT WAS NOT WORKING.  But not working, I mean the “autofill” did not work.

I went back through the years, and found that in 2015 the database was working and still works.  Copy the most recent version of EINDB.DBF that you can find that works to all of the other years that doesn’t work. 

I got some functionality at that point but it still wasn’t working well.

The second step is to reindex the DBF file and create a new CDX.  Rename the EINDB.CDX to EINDB.CDX-OLD.  This will disable it.  Then launch the software.  Go to Tools > Options > Employer/Payer Database.  The software should re-build the CDX file. 

In my case, this made it work.  Noticeably, the EIN’s were once again in numerical order.