Germany asks non-EU sellers — which, since Brexit, includes UK sellers — for more evidence than EU-based sellers because of three things working together:
• There is no registration threshold for foreign businesses — the obligation to register applies from your very first taxable transaction, so the tax office has to satisfy itself before you've traded, not after.
• A 2019 German law specifically addressed under-registered non-EU marketplace sellers, following an estimated hundreds of millions of euros a year in lost VAT revenue from that seller category.
• Non-EU applications, including UK and US ones, are routed through a centralised process rather than a local tax office, which brings additional identity, representation and activity checks by design.
None of this is specific to your
application — it reflects standard German tax office practice for any UK or US
business registering for DE VAT.
Each item below is a genuine German legal or administrative requirement:
|
Document requested |
Why the tax office asks for it |
|
Certificate of incorporation / company registration extract |
Confirms you're a genuine, currently active legal entity — the baseline check for any applicant. |
|
Articles of association (extract) |
Confirms your legal structure, ownership and who has authority to trade and sign on the company's behalf. |
|
Proof of intended German activity (contracts, supplier agreements, marketplace listings, purchase orders) |
Because there's no threshold period to observe actual trading, this is the substitute evidence the tax office uses to judge whether the registration is for genuine trade. |
|
Director / authorised signatory ID and address proof |
Standard anti-fraud identity verification, applied more rigorously to non-EU applicants since Brexit and the 2019 marketplace-fraud law. |
|
Power of attorney (where an agent or advisor is handling the registration) |
Confirms the tax office can legally correspond with, and rely on, the representative acting on your behalf. |
|
Description of your business model and supply chain (goods flow, storage location, customer type) |
Determines whether full DE VAT registration is even required, or whether a simpler EU-wide scheme (One-Stop-Shop) applies instead — this can work in your favour. |
|
Certified German translations of the above |
Foreign-language documents aren't generally accepted as-is; certified translation is a standard requirement, not an extra step specific to your case. |
Processing times are genuinely long, and it's worth planning around this rather than being caught out by it:
• Once all required documents are submitted and verified, it can take up to roughly 16-20 weeks to receive the VAT ID number.
• In practice, the full process — including document gathering, translation, and any follow-up questions from the tax office — often runs 2.5 to 5 months for non-EU applicants.
• Any request for clarification, an additional document, or a corrected translation restarts or extends the review clock, which is why submitting complete, accurate documentation in one pass matters.
• We identify upfront which documents a non-EU applicant will almost certainly be asked for, based on current German tax office practice, to reduce the number of follow-up requests.
• We check whether a simpler EU-wide scheme, such as the One-Stop-Shop, removes the need for full DE registration altogether, where your trading pattern allows it.
• We track your application against the tax office's typical response times, so we can tell you what's normal processing versus a genuine delay worth escalating.
The documentation requirements you're seeing come directly from German tax law for non-EU applicants, and apply to every UK and US seller registering for DE VAT — not just to your application. They exist because Germany introduced these checks after a well-documented, large-scale problem with under-registered non-EU marketplace sellers, and because full DE VAT registration for a non-EU business has no threshold and no fast-track route. The most reliable way through the process is complete, accurate documentation submitted in one pass, since each round of follow-up questions from the tax office adds to the timeline. We'll continue to guide you through exactly what's needed at each stage.