VAT ID Verification

If you supply businesses in other EU countries, you often invoice without German VAT: as a tax-free intra-EU supply, or so that the customer pays the tax in their own country (reverse charge). For that your customer has to use a valid VAT ID from their country. If the number is wrong, expired or does not belong to them at all, the tax office can later claim the tax from you. That is why a look beforehand pays off.

Under § 18e UStG the German Federal Central Tax Office (BZSt) confirms on request whether a foreign VAT ID is valid. The simple confirmation only tells you whether the number was valid at the time of the request. The qualified confirmation goes further: it also compares the company name, city and, if you like, street and postcode with the data the other EU country holds. Each field comes back with a letter: A means match, B means no match, C means not asked, D means the country does not share it.

Werkzeu.ge sends your request through the BZSt's official interface (eVatR), which replaced the old XML-RPC interface in July 2025. Before that we check the structure of both numbers so a typo does not first show up at the office: your own number must be German, because the BZSt only answers requests made with a German VAT ID, and your customer's number must fit their country's scheme. Greece is EL, Northern Ireland XI.

You see the result right away in plain words: valid, not yet valid, no longer valid or not assigned, plus for each field what matches and what does not. The BZSt wording sits next to it, unchanged, with status code and request id. If something does not match, we tell you the usual reasons (legal form, abbreviated street, accents) and what to do next.

Every answer becomes a PDF protocol with date and time, both numbers, your entries, the result per field and the BZSt message. The original answer is attached to the PDF unchanged, with a checksum. If you like, the protocol goes straight into the Aktenschrank under Fakturen / USt-IdNr-Prüfungen; otherwise you download it. A list of your recent checks stays only in your browser, and only with numbers and results.

Important: the proof is the BZSt confirmation itself; our protocol only records it. Whether a supply really is tax-free or reverse charge applies depends on further conditions, and in the end your tax office decides. The VAT ID Verification helps you prepare your own records cleanly. It is not a substitute for tax advice.