VIES
The European Commission's cross-border aggregator that lets you confirm a VAT number is currently registered in a given EU member state.
What it is
VIES (VAT Information Exchange System) is the European Commission service that relays VAT number validation queries to each member state's national tax administration and returns whether the number is currently valid. It is the authoritative source for cross-border B2B VAT number validation inside the EU.
Where you meet it
You meet VIES whenever you call the checkVat or checkVatApprox SOAP operations on ec.europa.eu/taxation_customs/vies/services/checkVatService. The response includes valid, name, address, countryCode, and vatNumber fields. A consultation number (requestIdentifier) is only returned when you supply the requester's own VAT number. In vatverify, the same check is exposed as REST under /v1/validate, which wraps VIES and normalises its SOAP faults into structured JSON errors.
Coverage
VIES covers the 27 EU member states plus Northern Ireland (XI prefix). It does not cover the United Kingdom, Switzerland, Liechtenstein, or Norway, each of which has its own national registry. See /check for the country-by-country routing vatverify uses.
The protocol is SOAP/XML; there is no REST endpoint published by the European Commission. Most modern integrations either build their own SOAP client or use a wrapper service.
Common confusions
- VIES does not store data itself. It forwards your query to the issuing country's registry, so downtime on a single member state can produce a
MS_UNAVAILABLEfault while the rest still work. - VIES only covers EU registrations plus Northern Ireland. UK VRNs are validated against HMRC, not VIES. See the UK page and the Northern Ireland page for the post-Brexit split.
- A
valid: trueresponse from VIES does not always include the company name. Germany, Spain, and Austria suppress trader name disclosure under national privacy policies; the number is still authoritatively validated, butnameandaddresscome back null.