How to check a supplier against the Lista Suja

Where the register is

The Lista Suja is published by Brazil’s Ministry of Labour and Employment as a public text file. There is no per-company search with an immediate result on a government site. The first step is always to download the complete file, current as of the date you check.

We publish a searchable view of the companies on the current register, with the retrieval date attached, at /lista-suja — which removes the download step for a one-off check.

How to search it properly

Each line carries an employer, the document number, the state, the number of workers involved in the inspection, the economic activity and the inclusion date. Search by document number, not by name: spellings vary, document numbers do not.

The same tax number can appear on more than one line, because entries are recorded per inspection rather than per employer. Stopping at the first match can leave others out — and those others may carry the more serious detail.

What to do with a positive result

If a supplier appears, the full line carries the context: state, activity, number of workers, inclusion date. That is what needs documenting — not merely the fact of a match, but the detail supporting it in a later audit. A finding recorded without its supporting detail tends not to survive scrutiny.

Why a single check does not work

The register changes. A new inspection can add a supplier at any moment, with no advance notice to anyone who already bought from them. A check performed at onboarding and never repeated stops reflecting reality from the first day the register is updated without your knowing.

In principle the manual process — download, search, record — would have to be repeated for every supplier, periodically, indefinitely. In practice that almost never happens consistently, because it is too repetitive to sustain by hand for long. That gap, rather than any individual check, is the real failure mode.

Common questions