CNPJ
The Brazilian National Registry of Legal Entities is a nationwide registry of corporations, partnerships, foundations, investment funds, and other legal entities, created and maintained by the Brazilian Federal Revenue Service. Currently, all companies are automatically enrolled in the system upon incorporation. The system uses a fourteen-digit number, which is made up of an eight-digit unique identifier, a four-digit branch identifier, and two check digits. The first number, 00.000.000/0001-91, has been assigned to Banco do Brasil, the country's largest public bank.
The CNPJ has become the most important number for commercial transactions between companies due to its ubiquity and official status. The RFB maintains a publicly accessible website where any CNPJ number can be checked; thus, for many purposes, it is now possible to discard all other non-essential information about a company and replace it with the CNPJ number. This is true, for instance, of product labels: instead of including the full name and address of the company manufacturing or selling a product, merchants include only the CNPJ, which can be easily found online and checked against the RFB's official database.
The Federal Government, interested in simplifying its registration procedures on companies appears in the mid-90's, but it was only in 1998, through the SRF Normative Instruction No. 27, that the CNPJ was created, replacing the former system, CGC. At the end of 2003 it gained a new impulse by sharing and integrating registration data and fiscal information between States and the Union. In 2009 the MEI was created to supply market demand.
The CNPJ consists of a 14-digit number formatted as XX.XXX.XXX/0001-XX —
The first eight digits identify the company, the four digits after the slash identify the branch or subsidiary, and the last two are check digits.
The CNPJ must be informed on any invoice of any company, as well as on the packaging of any industrialized product.
According to SEBRAE, there are more than 19.2 million active companies in Brazil, almost 6 million situated in São Paulo --, more than 4.8 million being 'Individual Microentrepreneur', 'Micro-enterprise' and/or 'Small Business'.
- Services - 8.641,860
- Trade - 6.612,605
- Industry - 1.908,250
- Civil Construction - 1.367,636
- Agriculture - 697.674
Among the more than 52.2 million employed persons, 45.5 million were salary workers and 6.8 million were in the condition of partner or ownership. The average monthly salary was R$2.952,87, equivalent to 3.1 minimum wages.
Also according to the IBGE, of the companies founded in the country in 2008, only 25.3% were still standing in 2018, 70% closed their doors in less than 10 years and only 25.3% were still standing ten years later.
In practice, about one in five companies went out of business in less than a year of operation — or 18.5% of the total.Graphic chart shows the distribution of salary workers, according to their legal nature, by gender and level of education in 2018: 71.1% were absorbed by business entities; 21.8% by the public administration; and 7.1% by non-profit entities.
Different cases of CNPJ-related frauds are recorded every year in Brazil. The most common types are:
- A fake entity cloning a regular entity's CNPJ to use it in banking transactions or when applying for credit.
- A fake website is designed, similar to the original website, using the same information as the regular entity but failing to provide the service.