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Zero-rating an intra-EU invoice? Without a VIES consultation number, you may owe the VAT yourself

When an EU business sells B2B to another member state, the invoice usually goes out without VAT - the customer self-accounts for it. One condition: the seller must have verified the customer’s VAT number in VIES, the European Commission’s registry. If the number turns out invalid and you can’t prove you checked, the tax authority can make you pay the VAT.

VIES has a public page, but checking 300 customers by hand every quarter is nobody’s idea of a job. So I built a bulk validator on Apify: EU VAT Number Validator (VIES). A few things I learned about the API on the way:

The REST endpoint is simple - and returns the legal proof

curl -X POST https://ec.europa.eu/taxation_customs/vies/rest-api/check-vat-number \
  -H 'content-type: application/json' \
  -d '{"countryCode":"IE","vatNumber":"6388047V","requesterMemberStateCode":"FR","requesterNumber":"40303265045"}'

A real answer:

{
  "valid": true,
  "name": "GOOGLE IRELAND LIMITED",
  "address": "3RD FLOOR, GORDON HOUSE, BARROW STREET, DUBLIN 4",
  "requestIdentifier": "WAPIAAAAaD5Jk8-i"
}

That requestIdentifier only appears when you pass your own VAT number as requester. It is the consultation number: the Commission’s dated record that you performed the check. Store it next to the invoice; it’s exactly what an auditor asks for.

Quirks worth knowing

• Germany answers “valid” but hides the name and address ("---"). A few member states do; it’s a policy choice, not an error.
• Member states go down. VIES queries each national registry live, and MS_UNAVAILABLE or MS_MAX_CONCURRENT_REQ are routine. Retry with backoff (2 s, 5 s, 10 s), and if it still fails, report “unavailable” - never a false “invalid”. My validator doesn’t charge for unanswered numbers.
• Syntax first. Each country has a strict format (NL is 9 digits + B + 2 digits, IE allows letters inside…). Validating the 28 patterns locally avoids wasting API calls - and FR 40-303.265 045 should be normalized, people paste VAT numbers in every imaginable shape.
• GB is gone, XI is not. Great Britain left VIES with Brexit (HMRC’s replacement API requires OAuth credentials), but Northern Ireland still lives in VIES under the XI prefix.
• Greece is EL, not GR. Accept both, send EL.

Monitoring beats checking

A VAT number isn’t valid forever - companies deregister, merge, go bankrupt. The validator has a monitor mode: schedule it monthly on your customer list, and it flags became_invalid numbers and pushes a Telegram/Slack/webhook alert, before the next invoice goes out wrong.

1,000 checks cost about $2, consultation proof included. Input templates and sample outputs: github.com/EuroScrape/apify-actors.

Part of the EuroScrape actor collection — all articles.