Should the key "ref:vatin" be used for registration numbers in equivalent systems in countries outside of Europe?

General talk
1

Should the key “ref:vatin” be used for registration numbers in equivalent systems in countries outside of Europe?
In Japan, there is a consumption tax, which is considered to be almost the same as value-added tax.
With the introduction of the invoice system in 2023, businesses will be assigned unique numbers.

2

What’s the numbering system called in either Japanese or English? There are a great number of ref:*=* subkeys and little need to reuse subkeys by analogy. In fact, there are so many with similar names that lately the trend has been to namespace by country code, for example ref:JP:*=*.

3 Likes
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Although I’m a European, I would assume that you could use it in your case as well, because it looks like in some countries that VAT id is called differently which may not sound related to VAT at all, but it works for the same purpose.
In Greece, the equivalent of that VAT id is called ΑΦΜ (tax identification number) which is used for all kinds of taxes and tax-related services and not just for the VAT. And since shops and various businesses show that id number on their receipts, that’s what we use for the ref:vatin=* tag.
Now for the letters that come at the start of the id to denote the country, it’s an EU thing because EU Commission offers an online service to verify those ids. I don’t know how you can use that tag, as in what to add to the value to make it unique for your country, but maybe check the TagInfo to see if there’s a non-EU value in there and how they are commonly written.

4

There are two answers: First, as Minh said, add the country code as in many other tags. Second, it’s not necessary in most cases: Most companies should have a local code, so it should belong to the country the POI is in.

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The number itself is simply called a 「登録番号」“registration number,” and to distinguish it, it seems to be referred to as the 「適格請求書発行事業者の登録番号」“registration number for qualified invoice issuers.”
「適格請求書」“Qualified invoice” is the official (statutory) term for an invoice in Japan.

6

I was hesitating about using that for Switzerland too, but decided to use operator:ref:CH:UID or ref:CH:UID instead, for the following reasons

  • Swiss VAT numbers are based on UID, but not all UID are VAT numbers (so some CHE values have “MWST” added in ref:vatin )
  • ref:CH:UID can be linked directly to a directory
  • For mapping, it’s more interesting to know the organization than their VAT status.