VIES is the system EU tax authorities use to check that cross-border business sales between member states were taxed properly. It serves two separate purposes under the same name and both activities are crucial for compliance in European trading.
The first of those jobs is validation, and the European Commission runs a free service that confirms whether a VAT number quoted by a business in another member state is valid and registered for intra-EU trade. The second is reporting, which puts an obligation on suppliers for EU trading compliance.
VIES stands for the VAT Information Exchange System. The EU Council established it under Council Regulation (EEC) No. 218/92, and it has run since 1 January 1993, when frontier controls on goods moving between member states were abolished and the customs paperwork that had policed those movements went with them.
By removing the border system this created a problem. Business-to-business sales across EU borders are zero-rated, which means the supplier charges no VAT and the customer accounts for it at home, so a supplier could in principle zero-rate a sale that never left the country and nobody at a border post would be there to notice.
VIES closed that gap by making both sides declare. The supplier files a statement listing each EU business customer's VAT number and the total value supplied to them. The customer declares the corresponding acquisition in their own country. Each member state stores and processes the data it collects, and the tax authorities compare the two sides. Where the figures fail to reconcile, the discrepancy is flagged for both authorities, which is how an under-declared acquisition in one country turns into a question about a supplier's records in another several months after the invoice was raised.
Services were outside the system at first. Council Directive 2008/8/EC brought business-to-business services into VIES reporting on 1 January 2010, and Council Directive 2008/117/EC introduced monthly filing for higher-volume traders on the same date. The system has covered both goods and services ever since.
VIES confirms whether a VAT number is valid for intra-EU transactions. Depending on the information made available by the relevant member state, the result may also confirm details associated with the number. However, VIES is not a reverse company lookup tool: you cannot enter a business name to find its VAT number, and national authorities will generally only confirm whether a stated name and address match the number.
National participation varies with regards to VIES inside the EU. Some member states operate their own register alongside the European service, and receiving a VAT number in those countries does not automatically place a business on the intra-EU register. Germany, Italy, Spain and Austria may require additional proof before they will accept a business onto it, which is a response to fraud around intra-Community supplies rather than ordinary administration. A business can therefore hold a perfectly valid domestic VAT number and still fail a VIES check, which usually means the intra-EU registration was never completed.
Nathan Trust deals with this at the registration stage for clients coming into Ireland, because a number that fails a VIES check cuts both ways. EU suppliers will charge you their own domestic VAT rather than zero-rating to you, and you cannot zero-rate your own intra-EU sales until the registration is complete.
Ireland is a common choice of EU registration for US and UK businesses, and it is English-speaking, common-law and inside the single market, which removes most of the friction from dealing with a tax authority in a second language.
Most VIES problems we see are not arguments about the law. They are businesses that registered for EU VAT, started selling across borders, and never learned a second return existed.
Our guides to Irish VAT registration and how to register for VAT in Ireland cover the application. Send us your last four quarters of intra-EU sales and we will tell you what is outstanding and what it costs to put right.
Open the European Commission's VIES validation page, select the member state that issued the number from the dropdown, enter the number without the country prefix, and submit it.
A valid result indicates that the VAT number is recorded as valid for intra-EU transactions. It does not, by itself, establish that a particular supply qualifies for zero-rating or that all supporting evidence requirements have been met. An invalid result means either that the number is not in the database of authorised persons or that it fails the format rules for the member state you selected. Formats differ by country and the country code prefix is part of the number.
Checking the format before you submit saves you chasing a customer over what turns out to be a transposed digit.
Validation is not compulsory in every case. Irish rules, for instance, treat the system as a check for numbers you doubt rather than a routine screen, and suggest that traders who know their customers and have dealt with them over a period should simply ask them to confirm their intra-EU number in writing. Where you want the confirmation on file, Revenue will issue a verification in writing on request.
Zero-rating a cross-border EU sale is conditional, and a valid customer VAT number is only the first condition. Taking Ireland's rules as the worked example, you may zero-rate an intra-EU supply where all of the following conditions are valid.
Miss any of them and the VAT position changes. Where a supplier cannot satisfy the tax authority that the conditions were met, the authority's position is that domestic VAT should have been charged on the supply and the supplier becomes liable for it, which means the VAT does not fall away merely because the customer was genuinely registered and the goods genuinely moved.
The evidence condition bites hardest when the customer collects the goods in their own transport. Retain transport documents, warehouse receipts or delivery dockets showing the goods reached the other member state. Record the vehicle registration used where the customer takes the goods away themselves. Nathan Trust works through this documentation trail as part of a VAT compliance review, because it is the condition most often missing when a tax authority does ask.
Every business registered for intra-EU VAT that zero-rates goods or services to a VAT-registered customer in another member state files a periodic VIES statement with its own tax authority. Revenue's guidance clearly states: as regards VIES there is no threshold, and a statement must be submitted regardless of value. A single zero-rated invoice for €200 creates a filing obligation for that period.
The statement carries aggregate figures rather than individual invoices. For each period you report your own intra-EU VAT number, each EU customer's VAT number including the country prefix, and the total value supplied to each of them. Goods involved in triangulation, where you sit as the middle party between traders in two other member states, are flagged separately, and so are call-off stock arrangements where goods move to a known customer's country before ownership passes. Moving your own goods to another member state for your own business purposes counts as an intra-Community supply even though no sale has taken place, and the value reported is the open market value rather than a book cost.
The VIES statement is additional to your VAT return and replaces nothing. A business can file perfect VAT returns and still be several VIES statements in arrears without noticing, which is the most common way this obligation goes wrong, because nothing in the ordinary VAT filing cycle prompts you to produce the second return and no reminder arrives until the arrears are large enough for officials to act.
Irish statements are due by the 23rd day of the month following the end of the period, so a January monthly statement is due by 23 February and a first-quarter statement is due by 23 April. Filing frequency depends on what you supply and how much of it.
A period with no intra-EU supplies still needs a return. A nil statement must be filed, and a period left blank is treated as a missed return rather than an inactive quarter.
Deadlines and frequency rules vary between member states, so a business registered in more than one country should not assume the Irish calendar applies everywhere. Nathan Trust manages the Irish filings directly and will tell you where a second registration pulls you onto a different timetable.
Penalties are set nationally rather than by the EU, and Ireland's are among the more pointed. Failure to comply with sections 82 or 83 of the VAT Consolidation Act 2010, or with the Value Added Tax (Statement of Intra-Community Supplies) Regulations 1993, carries a penalty of €4,000 per return outstanding.
A business four quarters behind is looking at €16,000 rather than a single €4,000 charge, and Revenue states in the same paragraph that it operates an active prosecution policy on this. Revenue also runs programmes of visits to traders that include checks of records and record systems, and it uses VIES data for compliance and control purposes rather than for statistics alone.
The obligation does not wait for a letter either. Revenue's position is that the onus sits on the trader to file even where the trader has never been told they are in scope. Bringing arrears up to date is almost always cheaper than waiting to be asked, and Nathan Trust files historic statements and corrections as part of that clean-up.
The two are collected together in most member states and they answer to different rules.
VIES is a tax control covering goods and services alike. It applies from the first euro, and it exists so that zero-rating claims can be matched across borders.
Intrastat is a statistical collection covering the physical movement of goods. Services never appear on it, and it starts at much higher annual figures. In Ireland you file once arrivals from other member states pass €750,000, or once dispatches made to them pass the same figure. Below those levels you file no Intrastat at all while still filing VIES on every zero-rated supply.
Our guide to Intrastat thresholds and filing sets out the detail, and Nathan Trust files both where a client crosses into Intrastat territory.
EU VAT law stopped applying to the UK on 1 January 2021, and the protocol arrangements split Northern Ireland's treatment in two.
Goods supplied to a VAT-registered trader in Northern Ireland are still treated as EU trade, because Northern Ireland follows the same VAT rules on goods as member states.
Services went the opposite way, and supplies of services to VAT-registered traders in Northern Ireland dropped off VIES statements on 1 January 2021 with nothing replacing the entry.
Great Britain left the system entirely, and supplies there count as exports.
The practical risk sits in your customer master file, where Northern Irish businesses often still carry the GB numbers they traded under before 2021, so supplies that belong on a VIES statement are left off one quarter after another. Two checks on that file settle it.
It applies to you if you hold an EU VAT registration and you zero-rate supplies to VAT-registered customers in other member states. Your head office address is not what decides it, and neither is where your directors sit. The EU registration is what brings you inside the system.
You are in scope where each of these is true.
A US or UK company that meets none of them files nothing at all, because it makes no intra-EU supplies to report. The question only becomes live at the point where stock sits inside the EU or a registration is taken out to support local sales. The same company holding stock in an EU warehouse and selling B2B to customers in other member states files a VIES statement in the country where it is registered, on that country's timetable, exactly as a local business would.
Selling to EU consumers rather than businesses is a different system, because there is no customer VAT number to match against and nothing to report on VIES. Where those sales belong depends on what you sell and where it ships from.
Our guide to EU VAT registration sets out which of these a non-EU seller actually needs.
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Nathan Trust is a private professional services firm regulated by the Chartered Accountants Ireland offering services in Ireland and the UK (CRO No. 173776, VAT Registration No. IE6334738V, UK Company No. NI728667) and is not affiliated with any government body. Clients may complete filings directly through official government channels if they choose. However, we provide professional support and guidance to help ensure full compliance when completing these processes.
What is VIES ?