Glossary

The shared vocabulary of tax-recovery infrastructure — the tax mechanisms we recover, the regulated rails we connect to, and the AI and platform concepts that make it defensible. Four families, plain-English.

Tax recovery

Reclaiming tax that a person or business has overpaid or is legally owed back — as distinct from tax compliance (meeting an obligation). Reclaim's entire category is about entitlements, not obligations.

VAT Value-Added Tax / IVA

The EU's consumption tax, charged at each step of a supply chain. Businesses generally reclaim the VAT they pay on inputs — but cross-border and foreign VAT often goes unclaimed because the process is manual and country-specific.

VAT gap

The difference between VAT theoretically owed and VAT actually collected across the EU — reported annually by the European Commission (DG TAXUD) at roughly €89 billion. A proxy for how much value leaks out of the system, some of it recoverable.

Cross-border VAT refund

Reclaiming VAT paid in an EU country where a business is not established (e.g. fuel bought abroad). Governed by Directive 2008/9/EC (intra-EU, filed via the taxpayer's home portal) and the 13th Directive (for non-EU businesses).

Excise duty

A tax on specific goods — fuel, alcohol, tobacco. Professional-diesel excise recovery lets qualifying hauliers reclaim part of the diesel excise in several EU states (e.g. via the "gasóleo profesional" census in Spain).

Per-diem / income-tax relief

Daily allowances and deductions cross-border workers (e.g. drivers) are entitled to for nights spent away — recoverable as income-tax relief when properly evidenced (tachograph / GPS records).

Customs duty & tariffs

Taxes on goods crossing borders. Importers frequently overpay through misclassification or missed preferential rates; duty recovery / drawback reclaims the excess — a large, specialised vertical.

Import VAT

VAT charged when goods enter a customs territory. Often deductible or refundable but routinely stranded for non-established or occasional importers.

Success fee / rev-share

The dominant pricing in tax recovery: the operator takes 15–35% of the amount recovered, and the taxpayer pays nothing if nothing is recovered ("no-win-no-fee").

Reclaimable pool

The total tax legally recoverable for a given taxpayer or segment — Reclaim's diagnostics estimate it before a claim is filed ("€X ready, €Y blocked").

Claim readiness

Whether a claim has everything it needs to file — valid supplier VAT ID, required fields, evidence, within the deadline. The core output of the extraction + rules layers.

VIESVAT Information Exchange System

The EU service for validating a business's VAT number across member states — used to confirm a supplier invoice is reclaimable.

Modelo 360

Spain's electronic form for requesting refunds of VAT borne in other EU states (the AEAT implementation of Directive 2008/9/EC) — filed by file-upload or web service.

Colaboración social

Spain's regime letting an authorised intermediary file with the tax authority (AEAT) on a taxpayer's behalf — one of two authorisation routes an operator uses at scale.

Apoderamientopower of attorney · REGAPO

A taxpayer's grant of authority for someone to act before the Spanish tax authority, registered in AEAT's REGAPO. Obtaining and managing these at scale is itself a product surface.

Tax authority"Hacienda" · AEAT · ELSTER · DGFiP · SdI

The national body that collects tax and receives filings — Spain's AEAT, Germany's ELSTER, France's DGFiP / Chorus Pro, Italy's Agenzia delle Entrate (SdI), etc. Each exposes different filing rails (API, file-upload, or portal-only).

e-Invoicing

Issuing invoices in a structured, machine-readable format rather than PDF/paper. Increasingly mandated across the EU, it turns messy document ingestion into clean structured feeds — a tailwind for Reclaim.

PeppolPan-European Public Procurement On-Line

The interoperable network and document standard for exchanging e-invoices across borders — a key connectivity surface as mandates spread.

EN 16931

The European standard defining the semantic model of an electronic invoice — the common shape most national mandates and Peppol build on.

ViDAVAT in the Digital Age

The EU reform package (adopted 2025, rolling out ~2028–2035) mandating digital reporting and e-invoicing for intra-EU trade. A structural driver of both complexity and opportunity for recovery infrastructure.

PSD2Second Payment Services Directive

The EU law that opened bank data and payments to licensed third parties — the legal basis for open banking. Its successor PSD3 / PSR is in progress.

Open banking

Programmatic, consented access to bank accounts. Lets Reclaim read account and transaction data and initiate refund-related payments through licensed rails.

AISPAccount Information Service Provider

A PSD2 licence (or an agent of a licensed provider) permitting read access to bank-account data.

PISPPayment Initiation Service Provider

A PSD2 licence permitting initiation of payments from a user's account — needed to move recovered funds.

eIDAS+ EU Digital Identity Wallet

The EU framework for electronic identity and trust services — qualified e-signatures/seals and national eID (e.g. Spain's Cl@ve) used to authorise filings. eIDAS 2.0 introduces the EU Digital Identity Wallet.

Qualified e-signature / seal

The highest legal tier of electronic signature under eIDAS — often required to submit filings to a tax authority on a taxpayer's behalf.

GDPR

The EU data-protection regulation. Drives EU-region hosting, data-processing agreements with AI vendors, encryption, consent, and retention/deletion — non-negotiable when handling taxpayer PII.

EU AI Act

The EU's risk-based AI regulation. Automated tax decisioning pushes toward transparency and human-in-the-loop obligations — which Reclaim's confidence + review layer satisfies by design.

DORADigital Operational Resilience Act

EU rules on operational resilience for financial entities and their critical ICT providers — relevant as Reclaim touches financial data and payment rails.

OCROptical Character Recognition

Turning an image of a document into text. A commodity input to Reclaim — the value is in what happens after (reconciliation, validity, rules).

IDPIntelligent Document Processing

OCR plus layout understanding and field extraction — pulling structured data (supplier, VAT, litres, dates) from messy invoices. Vendors: Mindee, Veryfi, Klippa, Rossum, Textract, Document AI.

Dual-extractor + reconcile

Running two independent extractors (e.g. an LLM-vision model and a specialised OCR API) and reconciling their outputs — the disagreement drives a confidence score. A wrong VAT number kills a claim, so this bias-to-caution matters.

LLM / SLMLarge / Small Language Model

The AI models behind extraction, reasoning and drafting. Small models handle cheap high-volume tasks; large models handle hard reasoning — routing between them controls cost and quality.

Inference gateway

A single optimised entry point for all model calls — routing, caching, guardrails, PII redaction, structured-output enforcement, and per-tenant cost accounting. Reclaim's "one gateway tuned per use case."

Semantic caching

Reusing a model result when a new request is close enough in meaning to a previous one — a major cost lever at platform volume.

Guardrails

Automated checks around model I/O — PII redaction, output validation, refusal handling — that keep automated decisions safe and auditable.

RAGRetrieval-Augmented Generation

Grounding model answers in retrieved source documents. Reclaim runs RAG over the legislation that backs each recovery type, so claims and advice cite the law rather than hallucinate it.

Vector database

A store that indexes text by meaning (embeddings), enabling the retrieval step in RAG over the legal corpus.

HITLHuman-in-the-loop

Routing low-confidence or high-stakes items to a human reviewer before filing. Both a quality mechanism and an EU AI Act alignment.

Confidence score

A calibrated 0–1 measure of how sure the pipeline is about an extracted field or a whole claim — it decides what auto-files and what a human checks.

Multi-tenancy

One platform serving many customer operators with strong data isolation between them — while still enabling shared, privacy-safe intelligence across the pool.

Feature store

A shared, governed repository of ML signals. Reclaim's cross-vertical feature store is how pooled data becomes fraud models and recovery-success priors without leaking any tenant's raw data.

Picks & shovels

Selling the tools everyone in a gold rush needs, rather than mining yourself. Reclaim sells infrastructure to recovery operators instead of chasing end-taxpayers.

Vertical operator

Reclaim's customer — a startup or firm serving one tax-recovery niche (trucking, SME VAT, import duty…) and owning its end-customer relationship. Reclaim powers it.

Data network effect

The platform gets better for everyone as more operators join — pooled (privacy-safe) data sharpens fraud detection, recovery-success prediction and benchmarks. Reclaim's core moat.

Ingredient brand

A brand carried inside the products it powers ("Intel Inside," "Powered by Stripe"). "Powered by Reclaim" transfers trust to end-markets without Reclaim going B2C.

CTO-as-a-service

Reclaim as the outsourced technical co-founder — best-in-class tech plus expert advisory — so an operator needs no technical founder or team.

Economies of scale

Unit cost falls as volume rises. One shared, best-version cloud + AI stack serving many operators beats each one building alone — the platform's structural cost advantage.

Operating leverage

Because most platform cost is fixed, each additional transaction is mostly margin — so profitability accelerates with scale.

Equity-for-services

Taking ownership in a customer in exchange for building/running its technology — the venture-studio lever in Reclaim's blended model, reserved for the co-build tier.

TAM / SAM / SOM

Total, Serviceable, and Serviceable-Obtainable markets — the nested sizing of the opportunity, built bottom-up in §3.

White space

An unoccupied position in the market. Reclaim's is the recovery-focused × developer-infrastructure quadrant no incumbent holds.