Checking a Brazilian exporter through CNPJ and public registries

A note on who is writing this. We are not a trading house and we do not sell the goods you would be buying. We help buyers verify a Brazilian counterparty independently, on the ground, before payment. Every registry below we checked ourselves on 8 September 2026, and where a fact rests on a secondary reading rather than the government page itself, the page says so.

The short answer

There are four checks worth running, and each answers a different question.

Check	What it confirms	Login needed	Cost
CNPJ Comprovante	The company exists and its cadastral status	No	Free
Certidão de Regularidade Fiscal	No federal tax or debt claims against it	Yes, gov.br account	Free
Habilitação no Siscomex	It holds the right to operate in foreign trade	No	Free
SIGSIF por País	Its plant is cleared to export to your country	No	Free

The tax check is the one that stands apart. It is the only one of the four that requires you, or the exporter, to be logged into a Brazilian government account. The other three answer to anyone with a browser and the company's CNPJ number.

Confirming the company exists: the CNPJ Comprovante

Every Brazilian legal entity has a CNPJ, the corporate taxpayer number. The Receita Federal runs a free service that issues a "Comprovante de Inscrição e de Situação Cadastral," a one-page card for any CNPJ, with no login required:

https://solucoes.receita.fazenda.gov.br/servicos/cnpjreva/cnpjreva_solicitacao.asp

The card shows the registration date (Data de Abertura), the trade and legal names, the company's size (porte), its primary and secondary CNAE codes (the activity classifications), its legal nature (natureza jurídica), the full registered address, and the cadastral status with the date that status was set. Read two of those fields together against what the supplier has told you. If a company presenting itself as a decades-old exporter shows a registration date from last year, that is a contradiction worth resolving before anything else. If its CNAE codes point to consulting or real estate rather than anything to do with beef or coffee, the same applies.

One field is not on the card. The share capital (capital social) does not appear on the Comprovante, and neither does the ownership structure. Those sit in a separate query. So the card tells you a company is real and active, not how well capitalised it is or who owns it.

The status field is where a deal quietly lives or dies. It takes one of five values.

Situação cadastral	What it means
ATIVA	Operating normally. This is the only clean result.
SUSPENSA	A temporary, fixable problem: an address or ownership mismatch, an investigation, a pending closure request.
INAPTA	The company has not filed returns for two or more years, or could not be found at its address. It cannot issue certidões.
BAIXADA	The entity is closed, by request or administratively. It cannot issue invoices.
NULA	The registration was annulled for serious irregularities, such as fraud at incorporation. Treated as if the CNPJ never existed.

Only ATIVA is green. BAIXADA or NULA means there is no company to trade with. INAPTA or SUSPENSA means the company cannot issue the tax certificates you will want next, and the risk of trouble with payment or delivery is real. The field names and their meanings here were read against a secondary breakdown of the card, because the Receita Federal's own descriptive page returned a 404 when we checked it. The service itself, and the status values, are as described.

Tax standing: the Certidão de Regularidade Fiscal

The second check confirms the company owes the federal treasury nothing. The Receita Federal and the PGFN jointly issue a "Certidão de Regularidade Fiscal perante a Fazenda Nacional," which states that on the date of issue there are no outstanding federal tax or debt claims against the entity. The service page is here:

https://www.gov.br/pt-br/servicos/emitir-certidao-de-regularidade-fiscal-perante-a-fazenda-nacional

It is free. Unlike the CNPJ card, it needs a login: a gov.br account at Bronze, Prata or Ouro level. That is the practical difference to hold in mind. A CNPJ card you can pull yourself in seconds. A tax certificate someone with a Brazilian gov.br account has to generate, which in practice means asking the supplier to produce a current one, or having a party on the Brazilian side do it.

The certificate carries a stated validity. A clean certidão (a Certidão Negativa, or a Certidão Positiva com Efeitos de Negativa) is valid for 180 days from issue, under Article 10 of Portaria Conjunta RFB/PGFN nº 1.751 of 2014. That validity window is what makes the document worth dating: a certificate the supplier sent you eight months ago no longer proves anything. The 180-day rule and the article text were read from a secondary copy of the Portaria; the act itself is named on the government service page. A certificate showing actual outstanding debt (a plain Certidão Positiva) does not carry that 180-day window, and a supplier who cannot or will not produce a clean one at all is telling you something.

The right to export: habilitação no Siscomex

A company can be real, tax-clean, and still have no authorisation to operate in foreign trade. That authorisation is the habilitação, and there is a public consultation for it on the Portal Único Siscomex. You enter a CNPJ, at least the first eight digits, and get an immediate answer, free, with no login:

https://portalunico.siscomex.gov.br/cint/#/habilitacao-situacao?perfil=publico

The service is described here: https://www.gov.br/pt-br/servicos/consultar-habilitados-a-operar-no-comercio-exterior

It tells you whether the party is habilitado to operate in foreign trade and under which submodalidade. A supplier claiming years of export experience who does not appear as habilitado is a contradiction on the level of a wrong registration date.

There is a recent wrinkle here, and it is the kind of thing that dates a page. The check used to live on the old RADAR page at the Receita Federal. As of 31 August 2026, that page has been switched to a notice, and the consultation now runs through Portal Único Siscomex, under Cadastro de Intervenientes, Habilitação, Consultar Habilitação. The old RADAR address is scheduled to go dark on 30 September 2026. If a guide still sends you to the RADAR URL to check an exporter, it was written before this move and is now pointing at a page that is being retired.

Plant clearance by destination: SIGSIF por País

For animal products, beef, poultry, leather, the single most important check is whether the specific plant is cleared to export to your country. Clearance is not a blanket status. The same SIF-registered plant can be approved to ship to one country and not to another, because approval is bilateral and set per destination.

MAPA runs a public, free registry for exactly this, "Estabelecimentos Habilitados à Exportação por País," where you filter by country or common market, product and zone:

http://sigsif.agricultura.gov.br/sigsif_cons/!ap_exportador_nac_pais_rep_net

It is described here: https://www.gov.br/agricultura/pt-br/guia-de-servicos/estabelecimentos-habilitados-a-exportacao-por-pais

The mechanics are simple. Take the SIF number from the supplier's invoice or product label, choose your destination country and the product in SIGSIF, and confirm that this SIF appears in the report. If it is not on the list for your country, the shipment will not clear your own veterinary import controls, whatever the supplier promises. There is a mirror service for checking approved foreign establishments too, useful when the flow runs the other way:

https://sistemas.agricultura.gov.br/pga_sigsif/pages/view/sigsif/consultahabilitacaoestrang/indexEstabelecimentoEstrangeiro.xhtml

One thing to keep in view. Because approval is bilateral, the major importing markets, the EU, the United States, China and others, also keep their own registries of approved Brazilian plants on the importing side. Those foreign lists exist and are maintained by the importing authorities. We have not verified their specific addresses or query mechanics here, so treat that as a pointer to confirm on your own market's authority, not as a link to follow blind.

Trade associations as a second signal

Membership in an industry association proves nothing on its own, but the large legitimate exporters are almost always in the relevant one, and most publish their member lists openly. It is a fast first read, not a substitute for the government checks above.

Sector	Association	Member list
Beef	ABIEC	https://abiec.com.br/associados/
Poultry and pork	ABPA	https://abpa-br.org/lista-de-associados/
Leather	CICB	https://cicb.org.br/associados
Sugar and ethanol	UNICA	https://unica.com.br/sobre-a-unica/associadas/
Coffee	ABIC	https://www.abic.com.br/institucional/associados/

The first four publish open, no-login member directories on the pages above. ABIC's list is public too, but it comes as a downloadable file rather than a directory you can read straight off the page. If a supplier in one of these sectors is nowhere in its association's list, that is not a red flag by itself, but it is a reason to lean harder on the registries that do carry legal weight.

What these registries do not show

Public registries confirm identity, tax standing, export rights and plant clearance. They do not confirm that any particular shipment is real, that the goods match the grade on the invoice, or that the bank account you are about to pay belongs to the company you checked. Match the razão social on the CNPJ card against the seller named in your contract, and against the account holder on the payment details, because a mismatch there is its own warning.

The export declaration itself, the DU-E, is not a buyer-side tool. Consulting a DU-E requires a Brazilian digital certificate tied to the exporter's own CNPJ, so you cannot independently verify one from the outside. You can ask the supplier for the DU-E number and reconcile its details against the invoice, but you cannot confirm the declaration in the government system yourself. Everything past the registries belongs to the deal documents and to inspection: the trade document checklist covers what should travel with the goods, and pre-shipment inspection covers confirming the cargo itself.

A verification sequence before you pay

Run the checks in an order that fails fast and cheaply.

1. Pull the CNPJ Comprovante. If the status is anything but ATIVA, or the registration date and CNAE codes contradict the supplier's story, stop here.
2. Check the habilitação on Portal Único Siscomex. No login, immediate, and a claimed exporter who is not habilitado ends the conversation.
3. For animal products, confirm the SIF number in SIGSIF for your destination country specifically, not in general.
4. Cross-check the razão social against the contract seller and the payment account holder.
5. Ask for a current Certidão de Regularidade Fiscal, and check it is dated within its 180-day window rather than a year old.
6. As a secondary signal, look for the company in its sector association's member list.

The first three cost you nothing and take minutes, and they catch the crudest problems before you have spent anything. What they cannot see is covered on the parent page, verifying a Brazilian exporter, and in the guide to export scams and red flags. The full branch starts at Sourcing from Brazil.

Sources

• CNPJ card: Receita Federal, Comprovante de Inscrição e de Situação Cadastral, https://solucoes.receita.fazenda.gov.br/servicos/cnpjreva/cnpjreva_solicitacao.asp. Service and no-login access confirmed. The field list, the absence of capital social, and the five status values were read from secondary breakdowns whose terms match the official classification, because the Receita Federal descriptive page returned a 404. Confirm against a live card.
• Tax certificate: gov.br, Emitir certidão de regularidade fiscal perante a Fazenda Nacional, https://www.gov.br/pt-br/servicos/emitir-certidao-de-regularidade-fiscal-perante-a-fazenda-nacional. Cost and login requirement confirmed. The 180-day validity and Article 10 of Portaria Conjunta RFB/PGFN nº 1.751/2014 were read from a secondary copy; the act is named on the service page. Verify the figure against the original before relying on it.
• Foreign trade authorisation: Portal Único Siscomex, https://portalunico.siscomex.gov.br/cint/#/habilitacao-situacao?perfil=publico, described at https://www.gov.br/pt-br/servicos/consultar-habilitados-a-operar-no-comercio-exterior. Confirmed. The RADAR move (consultation to Portal Único as of 31 August 2026, old page retiring 30 September 2026) was read from the RADAR notice page, https://servicos.receita.fazenda.gov.br/servicos/radar/consultasituacaocpfcnpj.asp.
• Plant clearance by destination: MAPA/SIGSIF, Estabelecimentos Habilitados à Exportação por País, http://sigsif.agricultura.gov.br/sigsif_cons/!ap_exportador_nac_pais_rep_net, described at https://www.gov.br/agricultura/pt-br/guia-de-servicos/estabelecimentos-habilitados-a-exportacao-por-pais. Foreign-establishment mirror: https://sistemas.agricultura.gov.br/pga_sigsif/pages/view/sigsif/consultahabilitacaoestrang/indexEstabelecimentoEstrangeiro.xhtml. Confirmed. The EU, US and Chinese importing-side registries are noted as existing and maintained by those authorities; their addresses and mechanics were not verified here.
• Association member lists, all confirmed by direct reading: ABIEC https://abiec.com.br/associados/, ABPA https://abpa-br.org/lista-de-associados/, CICB https://cicb.org.br/associados, UNICA https://unica.com.br/sobre-a-unica/associadas/ (open directories), ABIC https://www.abic.com.br/institucional/associados/ (member list as a downloadable file).
• DU-E not being publicly checkable by a buyer: consulting a DU-E requires a digital certificate tied to the exporter's CNPJ; read from a secondary source consistent with the Receita Federal access requirements.

All URLs checked on 8 September 2026. Brazilian registries and the acts behind them are revised often, and the RADAR-to-Portal-Único move above is one live example. Confirm the current service address and any date before relying on it.