EU-based businesses are required to obtain valid VAT numbers from VAT-registered entities.

Unfortunately, especially for e-commerce systems, there isn't a simple way to check the validity of a European VAT number. The European Commission provides a web site where you can validate VAT numbers by entering them in an HTML form. This is not practical, of course, for web applications.

Enter, the European VAT Number Validation API that I just hacked together on Google App Engine.

(more...)

For businesses based in the EU, it's important for VAT purposes to know whether your customers are also based in the EU. As usual, a quick Google search did not reveal a usable list of EU countries by ISO 3166 Alpha-2 code, so I whipped up my own.

european_union_countries = ('AT', 'BE', 'BG', 'CY', 'CZ', 'DK', 'EE', 'FI', 'FR', 'DE', 'GR', 'HU', 'IE', 'IT', 'LV', 'LT', 'LU', 'MT', 'NL', 'PL', 'PT', 'RO', 'SK', 'SI', 'ES', 'SE', 'GB',)

(more...)