VetThisVendor vs ASA

What this side of the table actually means

Thirteen national registers, not only VIES

The VAT check reaches the national company register in thirteen countries: Belgium, Bulgaria, Czechia, Estonia, Finland, France, Greece, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Portugal, Romania and Slovenia. VIES answers whether a number is registered. These registers answer who it belongs to and what state that company is in — and they keep answering on the days VIES does not, which is often, because VIES publishes no uptime guarantee.

Company state is the part a registration check cannot give you

For nine of those — Romania, Estonia, France, Greece, Bulgaria, Latvia, Lithuania, Belgium and Portugal — the register also reports whether the company is inactive, in liquidation, bankrupt, insolvent, terminated, ceased or struck off. That matters because a struck-off or bankrupt company usually still holds a VAT number that resolves perfectly cleanly. A registration check alone would call it valid and stop there.

Poland, where an IBAN can be traced to its owner

In almost every country no public register maps a bank account to a name, so no tool can tell you an account belongs to your supplier. Poland is the exception: the Ministry of Finance white list publishes the accounts that VAT-registered businesses have declared, so a Polish supplier’s IBAN is checked against the accounts they actually registered. Paying an unlisted account there costs the payer the deduction and can create joint liability for the supplier’s VAT.

The sanctions screen, and what it is not

Every check screens the company name against a local copy of the EU, UK and US sanctions lists, refreshed daily. It is a name-similarity screen, not a legal determination: it never sees dates of birth, registration numbers or ownership chains, so a possible match is a prompt to look properly and a clean result is not a clearance.

There is no combined verdict, on purpose

No score, no traffic light, no "safe to pay" badge. The commonest invoice fraud is a compromised mailbox at a real supplier, where every check passes and the bank details are still wrong. One green result would be a confident answer to the question none of these checks can settle, so each check reports independently and every result carries the same instruction: confirm bank details by phone, on a number you already had.

What this tool does not have

No API and no bulk checking. No UK VAT registry lookup either — HMRC requires an approved application this deployment does not hold, so a GB number gets its official check digit verified, which proves a number cannot be real but never that it is registered, and the card links to the free official checker on GOV.UK. Northern Ireland (XI) is checked in full, through VIES.