In "VAT numbers verification (VIES) — Odoo 18.2 documentation" I can see that a check of the VAT Tax ID via VIES (online system of the tax agency) can be activated via "Accounting ‣ Configuration ‣ Settings. In the Taxes section, enable the Verify VAT Numbers".
In the description there it was not clear exactly when or how often the number is checked.
Since VAT ID numbers can become invalid, improper invoicing with such a number can lead to liability for the taxes even when they're not in the customer invoice and the customer never pays them.
Therefore it is important to know when exactly the number is checked.
If it is only checked on initial creation of the contact, how would it be possible to force a re-check at some later date? Is it possible to set up a repeat check before each invoice is created?
And are the numbers verified for customers in our own country? In the description, the checkbox "Intra-Community Valid" is apparently only displayed for companies in other countries, so are only these actually validated?
Thank you Ray for your quick response on this. Seems strange that the IDs of the own country are not checked, as this is also possible online via the service. I'm wondering if using the XML-RPC API to retrive the Ust.-ID and then writing the same value back with the "write" call in XML-RPC will also trigger the check?
On further investigation, in the field list for the res-partner model, I can see a boolean field "vies_valid", which I'm assuming is the "Intra-Community Valid" checkbox. Its help text is "European VAT numbers are automatically checked on the VIES database." which would seem to imply that they are also checked for our own country (we're in the EU). There is also a boolean field "perform_vies_validation" with help text "Perform Vies Validation"