CNPJ

The Brazilian National Registry of Legal Entities (Portuguese: Cadastro Nacional de Pessoas Jurídicas, “CNPJ”) is a nationwide registry of corporations, partnerships, foundations, investment funds, and other legal entities, created and maintained by the Brazilian Federal Revenue Service (Receita Federal do Brasil, “RFB”). 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 (even though it does not belong to the first company to be enrolled), 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 (short for Cadastro Nacional da Pessoa Jurídica in Portuguese, or 'National Registry of Legal Entities') was created, replacing the former system, CGC (short for Cadastro Geral de Contribuintes in Portuguese, or 'General Taxpayers Registry'). 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 (Microempreendedor Individual...