If you are doing cross border business in the European Union, then will have to deal with so called “VAT IDs”. I’ve written a small example how to validate VAT ID’s from a DElphi 2007 program.
VAT ID’s identify business entities for taxation purposes. You have
to put your own and the ID of your business partner onto your
invoices. Basically you are responsible to check the validity of VAT
IDs.
There is an official Webservice that can be used to validate VAT ID’s. The “VAT-ID Checker” example shows how to consume that Webservice. It was a snap to implement in Delphi 2007 and there is nothing special to note 
Source code : VAT-Checker.zip
Executable: VAT-Checker.exe.zip
21/07/2010 Update: The webservice’s has been changed by EU a while ago. Source and EXE are updated to reflect these changes.
Entries (RSS)