Uses the official VIES VAT number validation SOAP web service to validate european VAT numbers.

Unfortunately their service is super unreliable.

go get -u github.com/goenning/vat

import "github.com/goenning/vat"

response, err := vat.Query("IE6388047V")
if err != nil {
  // do sth with err
}
if response.IsValid {
    fmt.Println(response.Name)
}

Because VIES service is very unreliable, this package will retry every failed request for a maximum of 4 times using an exponential backoff strategy.

This package always assume that country code is on ISO 3166 list.

Greece's ISO 3166 country code is GR, but EU uses EL. This package does the conversion so that you don't need to care about EU's country code. Same applies to UK, both ISO and EU uses GB, but this package will always convert UK to GB for safety reasons.

This conversion only happens for the CountryCode field and not VAT Number. So a EL094160738 is a valid VAT number for the GR country.

This package is a merge of mattes/vat and dannyvankooten/vat, with some refactoring and other features. Thanks!