Checking a Brazilian company against OFAC and UN sanctions

International sanctions lists are name-based, not tax-ID based, which makes them the easiest check to run and the easiest to get wrong. What the OFAC and UN lists are, why a name match is weak evidence, and how to treat a hit.

Last reviewed 9 August 2026

The two lists that matter most

The Specially Designated Nationals and Blocked Persons list is published by the US Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control, usually shortened to OFAC. It names individuals, companies and vessels subject to US sanctions programmes. Dealing with a designated party can expose you to US enforcement well beyond US borders, which is why it is checked routinely by parties with no American operations at all.

The United Nations Consolidated List carries entities designated under UN Security Council sanctions regimes, which member states implement in their own law. It is smaller and more targeted.

Neither is Brazil-specific. Both are global lists on which Brazilian entities may or may not appear, and for most Brazilian agricultural suppliers the honest expectation is that they will not.

Why this check is structurally weaker than the others

Every other register on this site keys on the CNPJ — an exact, unique identifier. These lists carry no CNPJ. Matching is by name, and that changes the quality of the evidence completely.

Brazilian naming makes it worse than it sounds. Surnames repeat at enormous scale, corporate names abbreviate inconsistently, and the same company may appear as a legal name, a trading name, or an anglicised form. A match on a common name is not evidence that you have found the same party. It is a prompt to check identity.

How we match, and why we do not fuzzy-match

We match exact and normalised forms — case, accents and punctuation set aside — rather than running approximate string matching. That is a deliberate trade-off. Loosening the match would surface more possible hits, and on a list of this size against common Portuguese surnames it would surface overwhelmingly false ones.

A screening tool that cries wolf gets ignored, and an ignored tool is worse than no tool. We would rather show you a smaller number of matches you can actually adjudicate, and say plainly that the check is not exhaustive.

What to do with a hit

Treat it as unresolved identity, not as a finding. Compare the full name, any address or country data on the listing, and the designation programme against what you know about your supplier. Sanctions listings usually carry identifying details precisely because names alone are ambiguous.

If it survives that comparison, stop and take proper advice before proceeding or paying. Sanctions exposure is one of the few areas in supply-chain diligence where the consequences are personal and immediate, and it is emphatically not something to resolve from a search result on any website, including this one.

If it does not survive, record what you checked and why you concluded it was a different party. That record is the point of doing it.

What a clean result is worth

It means no entry matching that name was found on the lists we hold, as at the date shown. It does not mean the company is not sanctioned. A designation under a name variant we did not match, an entity added since our last retrieval, or a listing of a parent or owner rather than the trading company, would all produce a clean result here.

It also covers only these lists. EU, UK and other national sanctions regimes are separate, and a party can be designated in one jurisdiction and not another. If your exposure is European, an EU-list check is not optional just because this one came back clear.

Common questions

Do US sanctions apply if I am a European company?

Potentially, yes — which is why the list is checked so widely. The scope of US jurisdiction is a legal question specific to your transaction, your currency, and your counterparties, and it is one for your own advisers rather than a screening tool.

Why do you not match similar names automatically?

Because on lists of this size, matched against common Portuguese surnames, approximate matching produces far more false hits than real ones. We prefer a smaller set of matches you can actually adjudicate, with the limitation stated, over a long list nobody reads.

Are Brazilian agricultural exporters often sanctioned?

Generally no. For most buyers this check comes back clean and its value is documentary — it evidences that you looked. That is a legitimate reason to run it.

Does this cover EU or UK sanctions?

No. We hold the OFAC and UN lists. EU and UK regimes are separate and would need their own check.

Every figure we publish carries its source and the date we retrieved it — see the methodology, or check a company against the forced-labour register directly. This guide is general information, not legal advice.

Search the OFAC sanctions list

The US Treasury Specially Designated Nationals list, searchable by name. Name matching is weaker evidence than a document match — treat a hit as a prompt to verify identity, never as a conclusion.

Search the OFAC sanctions list →

Checking one supplier is free and needs no account. To watch a list of suppliers across every register we hold and be told when something changes, see how monitoring works.