MBA Geek

Came across an interesting service today that lets you verify if a VAT number someone has supplied to you is correct and valid. It’s called VIES and is managed by the European Commission‘s Taxation and Customs Union Directorate-General. It looks like this:

All you need to do is provide the member state the VAT number belongs to, the VAT number itself and the system returns the name and address the VAT number is registered to.

Useful thing to know isn’t it?

Do you ever get those days when everything seems to have got confused? Well, I had a slip like that today. I was looking up information about Fannie Mae, the US mortgage-lending company and instead my search result took me to Fannie May, a purveyor of fine chocolates. Quite a bit of a difference, though interestingly Fannie May was rescued from bankruptcy a few years ago, in a pretty similar fashion to the way the US government rescued Fannie Mae quite recently.

It always pays to check your facts; because of a slight difference in spelling I almost ended up talking about chocolates instead of mortgages!

Anyway, Fannie May had a great history, being in the business of making chocolates since the 1920s. They were one of the few companies who managed to survive through World War II making their chocolates to the same recipes they always had, even though their raw ingredients weren’t so freely available. That’s a pretty great story and a great heritage for the company. Today they are owned by 1-800-flowers, so I expect they do quite a bit of business by mail order.

Interesting profile I thought. Has anyone out there tried their chocolates? If so, leave us a comment and tell us what they’re like.

Well, I’ve just booked out tickets for our trip to my graduation in November. I’ve never been to Edinburgh so we’ll be staying there a couple of days to explore the place too. My parents are planning to come too so that should be nice.

The only thing left now is to book my graduation gown. Let’s hope they have one my size.