ANAF: Romania VAT register

ANAF runs the Romanian register of taxable persons registered for VAT, and it is one of the few national VAT registers in the EU published as a per-number web service rather than a bulk download. That makes it the simplest register in the fallback path: Avatcado asks it about one number and gets an answer back while the request is still open.

ANAF is run by the Romanian National Agency for Fiscal Administration, and its data is published at webservicesp.anaf.ro. It is one of the 10 national registers Avatcado consults on the Pro and Business plans when VIES cannot answer for Romania, and it never replaces a VIES answer that does arrive. The national registry fallback guide covers the full precedence order.

What ANAF publishes

• Whether a Romanian fiscal code (CUI) was registered for VAT on a given date, with the date supplied in the request rather than fixed by the register
• The registered company name and the registered address, which are the values a fallback answer carries as company.name and company.address
• An explicit not-found list, so a code the register has never issued comes back as its own outcome instead of as a lookup failure
• The related Romanian VAT registers keyed off the same code, which Avatcado does not read: only the VAT registration flag is used

How Avatcado uses it

A Romanian fallback posts the numeric part of the VAT number and the current date to the PlatitorTvaRest v9 endpoint and reads one field, the VAT registration flag on the returned record. Only a true there produces an answer, served with source anaf and the name and address from the same record. A record that comes back without the flag, and a code the register does not know, both fall through to the cache instead of becoming valid false.

ANAF answers per number, so Avatcado calls it while your request is open, with a 10 second timeout. There is no snapshot to go stale (queried live on the request), so a fallback answer reflects the register as it stood at that moment. If the register is slow or down as well, the request falls through to the cache.

The rule that matters most is that a register can only ever confirm a registration. A miss, whether ANAF says not registered or simply has no record, is never turned into valid: false: the request falls through to the stored result instead. An answer that does come from here carries source: "anaf" and source_status: "fallback", and no consultation_number field at all, because only VIES issues those.

What a ANAF answer contains

Data quirks worth knowing

• Zero-padded or non-numeric CUI shapes are not looked up (^[1-9]\d{1,9}$)
• ANAF limits the service to one request per second, which comfortably covers outage traffic for a single country but rules out using it for bulk checks
• The lookup is date-scoped: Avatcado always asks about today, so the answer describes the registration as it stands now, not as it stood on the date of an old invoice
• The service is keyed by the fiscal code, which for a Romanian company is the same figure as the VAT number without the RO prefix

Try it

Validating a Romania VAT number takes the same call whichever source answers it. This one uses RO1590082, a real registered number:

curl "https://api.avatcado.com/v1/validate?vat_number=RO1590082" \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer avat_live_your_api_key"

import Avatcado from "@avatcado/node";

const avatcado = new Avatcado("avat_live_your_api_key");
const { data, error } = await avatcado.vat.validate({
  vatNumber: "RO1590082",
});

if (data?.meta.source === "anaf") {
  // VIES was unavailable; ANAF confirmed the registration.
  console.log(data.meta.source_status); // "fallback"
}

On an ordinary day that answer comes from VIES, with source_status: "live". Only when VIES cannot answer for Romania does ANAF step in, and then meta.source_status reads "fallback" and meta.source reads "anaf". The register fallback is included in the Pro and Business plans; the free tier covers 500 validations per month from VIES and the cache. Get an API key or read the API documentation.

Frequently asked questions

Keep reading

• Romania VAT number format and validation
• Country coverage: what answers every country Avatcado validates
• All 10 national VAT registers
• VIES Down? How the National Registry Fallback Works
• VIES Downtime: Why It Happens and How to Handle It
• VIES API Guide: REST Endpoint, SOAP & Integration