VIES VAT Number Validation

What a VIES check returns

You pick the member state that issued the number, type the number without spaces or dots, and get one of a short list of replies. The Commission’s help page lists them: “Yes, valid VAT number”; “No, invalid VAT number,” which it explains as “not valid at least on the date specified”; and several outage replies, including “Member State service unavailable,” which means the issuing country’s own system is down rather than the number being bad.

A valid reply can also carry the registered name and address. Whether it does is the issuing country’s call: “Certain Member States permit the display of the name and address of the taxable person where the VAT number is currently valid.” Where a country doesn’t, those fields come back as “---”. VIES works in one direction only. It confirms a number you already have; it can’t look up a business’s VAT number from its name, and the Commission says it has no access to that information.

A few format details trip people up. Greek numbers use the prefix EL, not GR. Austrian numbers are entered after the AT prefix starting with the letter U, as in ATU12345678. And since 1 January 2021 VIES no longer validates UK (GB) numbers at all; it validates Northern Ireland businesses trading under the Ireland and Northern Ireland Protocol, whose numbers start with XI. GB numbers are checked with HMRC instead.

The consultation number is the part you keep

A plain lookup tells you the answer but leaves nothing you can show anyone. VIES has a second field for that. In the Commission’s words: “If you put your own VAT identification number in the box requester’s VAT identification number, the reply will contain a unique consultation number. If you want to be able to prove to a tax administration of a Member State that you have checked a given VAT number at a given time, and obtained a given validation reply, please keep this consultation number in your archives.” Leave the requester field empty and the reply comes back without one.

The Commission’s REST service returns the same thing in machine form: the country code and number checked, a request date, a valid flag, the name and address (or “---”), and a requestIdentifier field holding the consultation number when a requester was given. If you check numbers yourself rather than relying on a billing system, that identifier and date are what to save against the customer record.

Note what VIES is not for. The Commission’s disclaimer limits use to confirming customers’ numbers for cross-border supplies and forbids extracting or republishing the data. Its FAQ adds that the service is “designed for single requests,” not batch runs.

What a valid result proves, and what it doesn’t

Article 18(1)(a) of Regulation 282/2011 asks for two things: the customer gives you its VAT number, and you confirm “the validity of that identification number and of the associated name and address.” A check that returns valid but shows no name and address is weaker evidence than one that does, which is why it pays to compare the returned name with the customer you are actually billing. Where a country withholds the name, the Commission notes that you can ask your own tax administration to confirm whether a VAT number is associated with a given name and address.

Article 18 also opens with a condition: “Unless he has information to the contrary.” A valid number doesn’t help if the facts point the other way. The Commission’s FAQ is blunt about it: “If you believe that your customer is not a taxable person, you should not exempt the supply but should charge VAT.” Article 19 adds a related limit: a business that buys a service purely for private use counts as a non-taxable customer for that supply.

Tax authorities apply the same logic from the other end. Irish Revenue tells suppliers of services to EU businesses to “obtain the business customer’s Value-Added Tax (VAT) number and confirm its validity,” put that number on the invoice, and mark the invoice as reverse charge, and warns: “If you incorrectly identify your customer and do not charge VAT, you will be liable to pay the VAT,” with interest and penalties possible on audit. The Commission’s own help page says confirmation of validity is “only ONE of the elements of evidence” for leaving VAT off a cross-border supply.

When the answer is invalid, or there is no answer

An invalid reply has a few innocent causes, and the Commission’s first step is to rule them out: check the number with the customer, including its length and country prefix. If it still fails, the customer has to ask its own tax administration to update the VIES record, because “only national tax administrations can update VIES data.” The FAQ adds a reason that catches new businesses: some member states only record a number in VIES once the business has registered for intra-EU trade, so “a VAT number, even if correct, will not be validated through VIES” until that happens.

Article 18(1)(b) covers the customer that has applied for a number but not yet received one. The supplier may still treat it as a business if it obtains other proof of taxable status and carries out “a reasonable level of verification” using normal commercial checks. Irish Revenue’s version is a letter from the customer’s tax authority.

Then there is the case where VIES can’t answer. The service depends on each country’s system being up, and some have published maintenance windows. Ireland’s, for example, is unavailable on Sunday nights for up to two hours. An outage is not a failed check. Retry it later, and decide in advance how your billing treats a sale that happens while the check is pending.

How Stripe uses VIES, and the gap it leaves

Stripe validates every tax ID of type eu_vat against VIES when it is added to a customer, including Northern Ireland numbers, which Stripe files under eu_vat with the XI prefix. The result sits on the tax ID object as verification.status (pending, verified, unverified or unavailable) along with verification.verified_name and verification.verified_address, the name and address VIES returned. Stripe sends a customer.tax_id.updated event when verification finishes, and the Dashboard shows the VIES details when you hover over the number.

Three parts of Stripe’s documentation matter for compliance. First, the check covers the number only: “you still need to verify the customer’s name and address to make sure it matches the registration information.” Second, it happens once: Stripe says “we don’t continue to validate them over time,” so a customer that deregisters next year still shows its old status. Third, the tax calculation doesn’t wait for the answer. “If you use Stripe Tax, Stripe Tax applies the reverse charge or zero rate according to applicable laws when the tax ID has the required number format, regardless of the government verification result.” Stripe leaves the response to an unverified number to you, “based on your own compliance requirements,” and if the status is unavailable, you must verify the number yourself.

So a correctly formatted but invalid VAT number still produces an invoice with no VAT on it. A practical routine is to watch for unverified results, compare verified_name with the customer’s name, and recheck long-running subscription customers yourself from time to time. Stripe’s status doesn’t carry a VIES consultation number, so a seller that wants one has to run its own check with a requester number.

What the check means for your QuickBooks records

A reverse-charged sale reaches the ledger as revenue with no output VAT: the invoice total is the net price, and there is no tax line to post to a VAT liability account. In QuickBooks that sale looks the same as one you simply forgot to tax. Nothing on the transaction says why the VAT is missing.

That makes the evidence a records question, not a ledger question. Keep the customer’s VAT number on the invoice (Stripe prints a customer’s tax IDs in the invoice header), and keep the proof that you checked it: the Stripe verification status and verified name, or your own VIES consultation number and date. If a tax authority later questions a zero-VAT sale, that record is what turns a missing tax line into a documented reverse charge. Where you file EU sales lists or VIES statements for B2B services, the same customer numbers have to be right there too.