Lacey Act: the species field that stops timber shipments
What the US Lacey Act requires for timber and derived products from Brazil, and the single missing data point that most often causes a hold at the border.
What the Lacey Act requires
The US Lacey Act requires imports of timber products to be accompanied by a declaration — form PPQ 505, or 505B for consolidated shipments — identifying the scientific name of the species (genus and species, not the trade name), the country where the timber was harvested, and the value or quantity. It applies across a broad list of products by HTS code, from rough timber through to furniture and paper.
The declaration is filed by the US importer or their broker. But the data filling it comes from the origin documentation the Brazilian exporter supplies. If that documentation is incomplete, the problem surfaces on the US side, at clearance, not before.
The Brazilian document behind it: the DOF
The corresponding Brazilian document is the DOF (Documento de Origem Florestal), which authorises and accompanies transport of native forest products. It is issued by IBAMA federally, or by delegated state agencies — IEF in Minas Gerais, SEMAS in Pará, SEMA in Mato Grosso, among others — depending on where the timber was harvested.
The DOF has fields for control code, issuing agency, volume, harvest date and species name. The problem is rarely that the document is missing. It is how it was filled in.
The gap: the missing scientific name
DOFs commonly arrive with the trade name filled in — ipê, cumaru, jatobá — but without the full scientific name in Latin, which is exactly what a US broker needs to complete the PPQ 505/505B correctly. Trade names vary by region and can map to more than one botanical species; the US declaration does not accept that ambiguity.
The omission passes unnoticed through the entire Brazilian chain. Stamped, numbered and filed, the DOF looks complete — right up to customs clearance in the United States, when it is too late to correct without delay.
What happens when it is missing
The shipment is not held because the timber was illegal. It is held because a form that looked 90% correct is incomplete in the one field that matters to the person processing the entry. The practical result is clearance delay and its operating cost, not a bad-faith penalty.
For a buyer, this is the cheapest possible thing to check early and the most expensive to discover at the port.
Cross-referencing the DOF
Like the cattle transit permit, the DOF is a document the supplier presents on their own account. There is no public API to validate one in real time — the only official public lookup, on IBAMA’s portal, is captcha-protected with no programmatic endpoint. The way to add confidence is to cross-reference it against the electronic invoice (NF-e) for the timber movement, which originates independently in the state tax system.
BrazilTrace performs that cross-reference and flags specifically where the scientific species name is absent — the field your broker will need, checked before the shipment leaves Brazil rather than discovered at the destination port.