The Nigerian TIN

Two generations of the same number

Nigeria has issued TINs in two shapes, and a company generally has both.

• 1002183661The ten-digit number issued through the Joint Tax Board. This is the modern form and the one quoted most often.
• 00969009-0001The older FIRS form: eight digits, a hyphen, and four more that name the tax office. Still current on plenty of documents.

Both find the same company. Vatlas accepts either, and stores one history against the company rather than two — but the hyphen is load-bearing at the register: searching 009690090001 finds nothing where 00969009-0001 finds the company, so the lookup puts it back before asking.

There is no published check digit for either form, so a Nigerian number cannot be validated offline.

Finding the company behind the number

The NRS verification service

The Nigeria Revenue Service publishes a free TIN verification service, open to anyone, with no account and no captcha. It takes a TIN, a registration number or a phone number, and answers with the taxpayer's name, both spellings of the TIN, the registration number and the tax office.

What it does not answer

No address and no status. The service says whether a number is registered, never whether the taxpayer is still trading. Vatlas reports that as unknown rather than inventing a state for it — that is the register's own position, not a gap in the mapping.

The company register is out of reach

The Corporate Affairs Commission holds the companies, and its search sits behind a challenge that no program passes. So the name on a Nigerian answer comes from the tax service and not from the company register.

Nigeria-specific pitfalls

• Keep the hyphen in mind. Twelve bare digits will not be found; the old form needs its separator.
• No status, by design. A hit proves the number is registered, not that the business is active.
• No address. The service publishes none, and no free source will give you one from a TIN.
• No offline validation. There is no check digit to verify, so a typo costs a lookup.
• The institution is changing. The Joint Tax Board became the Joint Revenue Board on 1 January 2026, and the service has already been rebranded NRS. Expect the details to move.

One API, one response shape

Vatlas turns a business tax number into a company record: legal name, national identifier, legal form, status and address. Nigeria — the same call and the same response as for every other country covered.

curl "https://api.vatlas.dev/v1/lookup/NG009690090001" \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer $VATLAS_KEY"

Response:

200 OK

{
  "data": {
    "vatNumber": "NG009690090001",
    "countryCode": "NG",
    "nationalNumber": "009690090001",
    "nationalId": "395010",
    "name": "MTN NIGERIA COMMUNICATIONS PLC",
    "legalForm": null,
    "status": "unknown",
    "address": {
      "line1": null,
      "line2": null,
      "postalCode": null,
      "city": null,
      "country": "NG"
    }
  },
  "meta": {
    "source": "FIRS",
    "sourceDate": "2026-09-15",
    "sourceSince": "2026-09-15",
    "sourceUpdatedAt": null
  }
}

meta.source names the register that answered (SIRENE, ARES, VIES…) and meta.sourceDate the day it said so: the publication date of the file for a register we import, the day of the call for one we query live. The shape of the response never changes from one country to the next.

Get a free key Read the documentation

Business numbers in other countries

• Brazil
• Peru
• Israel
• Vietnam
• Singapore
• All countries

Last updated 15 September 2026.