Checking a VAT identification number, and what the answer is worth
A withdrawn registration does not notify its former trading partners, so the check you ran at onboarding is not evidence — it is a statement about one afternoon years ago. Since 2020 that difference decides whether a cross-border supply stays exempt.
The everyday mix-up
The tax number is the tax office’s file reference. This is the European one.
A VAT identification number identifies a business for cross-border transactions inside the European Union. It is issued by a member state, begins with that state’s two-letter code, and exists alongside whatever domestic tax number the business already has. Only the European one belongs on an intra-Community invoice.
It is not a company register entry, not a trade licence and not a creditworthiness indicator. A number can be valid while the business behind it is insolvent, and invalid while the business is entirely real — because the registration is days old. A rejected number is more often a timing problem than a customer problem.
Since 1 January 2020 the number carries more weight than it used to. Used for the transaction, it is a substantive condition of the exemption and no longer a formality that can be repaired afterwards.
- The prefix is not always the country code of the address
- Registered in several member states? Another state’s number can be right
- What matters is which number is used for this particular transaction
Before you treat green as clearance
What a validity check does not prove
Every one of these has caused a real loss somewhere. The simple query is genuinely useful — it is simply narrower than it looks.
- Not that the number belongs to the customer you are dealing with — a simple query returns validity, not identity
- Not that the person placing the order is authorised to represent that business
- Not that the business is solvent, or that it still exists today rather than at the time of registration
- Not that the goods will actually arrive in that member state — arrival needs its own evidence
- Not that the delivery address and the registration belong together
- And not, at present, anything automatic on our side: we validate format and country prefix only, with no VIES look-up behind it
Two different answers
The qualified request compares field by field. That is the whole point.
The simple query, through the European VIES service or through the German Federal Central Tax Office, answers exactly one question: is this number valid at this moment. Useful, and not sufficient, because it says nothing about who holds the number.
The qualified confirmation request under § 18e of the VAT Act goes further. Alongside the number you submit the company name including legal form, street, house number, postcode and town, and the office compares each field individually against the register of the issuing state. The answer comes back per field: matching, not matching, or not verifiable.
That granularity is the document on which the protection of legitimate expectations under § 6a(4) rests, if the customer turns out to have been someone else entirely.
- A partial mismatch is a genuine finding, not a formatting quirk
- Archive the answer with date and time — evidence without a date is not evidence
- Repeat it for recurring customers; a validity describes a moment, not a property
Format first
How the number is built, by member state
A format check catches typing errors, transposed digits and numbers pasted from the wrong field. It catches nothing else — but it catches those before an order is placed.
| Member state | Prefix | Structure after the prefix |
|---|---|---|
| Germany | DE | 9 digits |
| Austria | ATU | U followed by 8 characters |
| Netherlands | NL | 12 characters, with a B in the tenth position |
| France | FR | 2 characters (letters or digits) followed by 9 digits |
| Italy | IT | 11 digits |
| Spain | ES | 9 characters, beginning and ending with a letter or digit |
| Belgium | BE | 10 digits, beginning with 0 or 1 |
| Poland | PL | 10 digits |
| Denmark | DK | 8 digits |
| Sweden | SE | 12 digits, the last two being 01 |
| Czech Republic | CZ | 8, 9 or 10 digits |
| Ireland | IE | 8 or 9 characters, including letters |
The route to a usable answer
Five steps to a confirmation you can rely on
The order matters, because the qualified request presupposes the first step and is pointless without the second.
Hold your own VAT identification number
Only a business with its own number can submit a qualified confirmation request. If you do not have one yet, that is the first application, not the last.
Run the simple query first
It costs nothing and it filters out the largest group of failures: typing errors, an expired registration and numbers copied from an old document. If it fails here, a qualified request will not rescue it.
Submit the qualified request with name and address
Exactly as the customer states them, not as your own master data holds them. Discrepancies in the legal form and in abbreviations of street names are the most frequent cause of a partial mismatch, and a partial mismatch is worth following up.
Archive the result with a timestamp
The answer is your evidence. Store it with the customer record rather than in a mailbox, ideally in the machine-readable form the office offers.
Repeat it for ongoing business
How often depends on your risk. What does not work is checking once at onboarding and relying on it three years later — a withdrawn registration does not notify its former trading partners.
Around the number
What the number changes on the invoice
- VAT on goods to EU businessesWhy the exemption for goods is not reverse charge, and what has to be true for it.
- Terms of serviceClause 7.2 sets out your duty to state the number and our right to charge VAT subsequently.
- Gas analyticsNet prices at the position, before any account is created.
- Filters and strainersReordered often enough that the tax treatment is worth settling once.
One field, then the basket
Store the number where the invoice can find it
shukchok is an open marketplace for industrial goods: company name is a mandatory field in the profile, and the VAT identification number sits next to it. We validate format and country prefix; the confirmation of validity stays yours to obtain — and it is far quicker to get before the first purchase than after it.