The EU administration itself or the national tax authorities in the EU should have provided an official service like this to go with the VAT changes for digital sales from day one.

I appreciate someone else stepping up and doing it, though I'd want to see more information about the source(s) they were using for the data and how frequently they were checked before I'd hook a real business up to a third party service like this.

How about different rates for different goods / services? This looks like a gross oversimplification. Doing VAT correctly is quite hard - there is a reason why there are dedicated VAT specialists working in larger consulting firms.

The barrier of running an EU B2C business is so high if you need to sell all over EU that most of the time it doesn't even make sense. It's a shame because if you're in the EU and you want to bootstrap a small B2C business you have no choice other than sticking to the country you're in.

Is there any reason to ask for the country of the business/seller? As far as I know it's irrelevant and the VAT only depends on the buyer's country (for digital goods/services).

While the effort in general should be appreciated (especially open sourcing the code!), I'm doubtful that the REST API has practical use.

"I calculated the VAT for the products I'm selling using that one website" is just too much of a liability risk for a business to take. Who do you hold liable in the event that the calculation was wrong?

Something similar, but not the same: http://ec.europa.eu/taxation_customs/vies/technicalInformati...

Official Europe VAT Verification Service endpoint ( docs )

Edit: for checking the VAT Id

That won't work in Ireland. While 23% is the headline rate, it's not the only rate: https://www.taxworld.ie/vat/summary/vat-rates/

I was looking into this recently and found this for Elixir, it looks good: https://github.com/xavier/european_vat

You should specify a bit more clearly (it's on the bottom though) that this is for B2C. B2B different rules apply.

While this is a great way for you to collect internal business numbers from other companies, I don't quite see how the benefit for those companies is so large that it warrants sending internal information to you.

By the way, do you plan to provide statistical summaries of your findings? Such as: How many companies from country X works with what set of countries Y? How many invoices do they (approximately) file to which country?

EDIT: Fixed typo.

In Greece, in some island in the Aegean Sea, the VAT rate stayed at 17% for 2017 (and did not rise to 24%).

This does not make the distinction between consumers and corporate (VAT registered) customers nor does it make a distinction between services and goods (and various classes of goods, to make things even more complicated). Which makes me suspect this is a very broken implementation and you should not rely on it for your business needs.

This shouldn't be an API. It should be a query library and a dataset you can download with a batch job.

Please consider releasing the source code.

VAT just sounds like a huge, overcomplicated mistake by the EU.

Why do you guys continue to live with it instead of repealing or fixing it?

Why use POST?

Nice api. Taxation is theft.

Doesn't seem correct, at least for Holland.

As far as I'm aware, as a seller in The Netherlands, you only have to charge VAT for buyers that are also in The Netherlands.