Before you pay a Brazilian supplier: a 10-minute check

The checks worth doing before money leaves your account, in the order that catches the most problems soonest — and the ones that are not worth your time.

Last reviewed 3 August 2026

Start with whether the company exists at all

Every Brazilian company has a CNPJ, a 14-digit federal tax number. Ask for it before anything else, and treat reluctance to give one as the answer to your question. A supplier who trades legitimately hands it over without hesitation — it appears on their invoices anyway.

With the number you can confirm the registered name, whether the registration is active, when the company was incorporated and what it is registered to do. Roughly the commonest problem is not fraud but mismatch: the company you were quoted by is not the company on the invoice, or the registration was suspended two years ago and nobody mentioned it.

Then check the age and the activity

Incorporation date matters more than it sounds. A company formed three months ago that is asking for a large advance payment is not necessarily fraudulent, but it is a different risk from one trading since 2004, and it should change what payment terms you accept.

Registered activity — the CNAE code — is worth a glance too. A company registered for retail clothing that is quoting you on frozen beef is not automatically a problem, because Brazilian companies often carry several activities, but it is a question worth asking out loud before you pay.

Then the registers that would embarrass you later

Three public registers carry findings that are cheap to check and expensive to discover after the fact: the forced-labour register maintained by the Ministry of Labour, federal debarment (CEIS and CNEP) held by the Comptroller General, and environmental embargoes published by IBAMA. Any of them appearing against your supplier is something you want to know before your name is attached to theirs, not after.

None of these is a fraud check. A company can be on all three and still ship exactly what you ordered. They matter because your own customers, bank or auditor may ask, and "we did not look" is a poor answer.

What is not worth your time

A company website tells you almost nothing. They are cheap, quick and easy to copy, and a convincing one is not evidence of anything. The same goes for photographs of premises, certificates presented as images, and references supplied by the supplier themselves.

Equally, do not over-weight a clean result. Checking public registers tells you what those registers say today. It does not tell you whether the goods exist, whether the price is real, or whether the bank account on the invoice belongs to the company you checked — and that last one is where a great deal of actual loss happens.

The payment itself is the risk you control

Confirm banking details through a channel you established, not one that arrived in the same email as the invoice. Invoice interception is mundane, common and does not require the supplier to be dishonest — only that someone has access to an inbox.

Where you can, structure the first transaction so that failure is survivable: smaller first order, staged payment, or a letter of credit for anything large. Due diligence reduces the chance of a problem. Payment structure decides what a problem costs you.

Common questions

How long does this actually take?

The identity and registration checks take a couple of minutes if you have the CNPJ. The public registers take longer by hand because each publishes bulk files rather than a per-company lookup, which is the part we automate — a BrazilCheck report runs all of them and returns a single document.

Is a clean report a guarantee?

No, and we would not sell it as one. It is a record of what public registers said at a moment in time, with the source and date against every finding. It cannot tell you whether goods exist or whether an invoice is genuine.

Do I need this for a small first order?

That is a judgement about what the loss would cost you rather than about the supplier. Many buyers reasonably skip formal checks on a small trial order and run them before scaling up. The mistake is scaling up without ever going back and doing it.

A BrazilCheck report runs these checks against the public registers and returns one document, with the source and retrieval date against every finding. Evidence, not a score.

Check a CNPJ