VAT Identifier Discovery
A research pipeline that finds UK companies' VAT numbers on their own websites and checks them against the official HMRC registry.
About the project
A research pipeline for finding the VAT numbers of UK companies. Businesses that sell online have to publish their VAT number, so the pipeline looks for it on each company's own website and checks every candidate against the official HMRC registry.
Besides the pipeline, the project compares other possible sources and estimates what a full run over all UK companies would cost.
What it does
- 01
Validation against HMRC
Each number is checked through HMRC's public VAT checker, and the registered name is compared with the company's name.
- 02
Website discovery
Homepages and legal pages such as terms, contact and about are fetched and searched for VAT numbers.
- 03
Other sources compared
Companies House data, EORI numbers and the Common Crawl archive were tested as alternatives, with what each one can and can't do.
- 04
Scaling and cost
A production outline: domain lookup through a search API, an estimated $0.01–$0.03 per company, and the failure modes to watch.
How it's built
- Language
- Python
- Libraries
- requestsBeautifulSouppandaswarcio
- Sources
- HMRC VAT checkerCompanies HouseCommon Crawl
Next project
Padel-Connect