Venezuela Contractors Registry

The Venezuela Contractors Registry (Registro Nacional de Contratistas, RNC) is a database housing information about Venezuelan government contractors. The database provides snapshots of a given company’s status as a government contractor, in turn providing key contextual information about the relationship to an investigator.

The RNC is managed by an administrative unit of the same name (henceforth the Registry) within the National Contracting Service (Servicio Nacional de Contrataciones), an organ of the Venezuelan government’s Central Planning Commission (Comisión Central de Planificación).

How is the Venezuela Contractors Registry structured?

[Note: The following analysis is based on a combination of documentation and inference from repeated use by analysts.]

It’s best to think about an entry in the database as a snapshot-in-time of an authorized government contractor’s status.

The approval, authorization, and expiration or re-authorization process for contractors in Venezuela involves a number of steps that can help inform users’ understanding of the data structure:

  • Companies seeking to serve as authorized government contractors submit paperwork, including current ownership and control information, to the Registry.
    • If the company is approved, the Registry will release its ownership and control details, in the form of a digital company profile “snapshot,” to the general public through the website’s search feature. Only one snapshot per company is visible at any given time. Companies are then given an expiration date after which they must re-apply to continue to serve as a contractor.
    • If authorization is denied or the registration process is interrupted, the company’s snapshot may exist on the website, but will not be visible to the public.
  • If a company’s details change while its registration remains active, it will submit updated details to the registry. The previous snapshot will be replaced by a new snapshot featuring the updated details.

  • Once the company reaches its expiration date, it may either choose to re-apply for authorization, or to let its authorization lapse.
    • If the company re-applies, it will submit updated ownership and control information. If approved, this information will yield a new snapshot which will replace the previous snapshot in the database.
    • If the company’s authorization lapses, the Registry will deactivate its profile and remove its most recent snapshot from public view by hiding it in the website’s search results.

Sayari Graph users can access historical snapshots filed with the registry, as well as information on lapsed or unapproved contractors—both of which are hidden from public view in the original database.

When is a Venezuela Contractors Registry record true for?

If you search for a company on the RNC website and it returns a result, the information will be accurate as of today. If you find a company snapshot in Sayari Graph, the information will be accurate as of the date that snapshot was filed by the company. However, the RNC snapshots themselves do not provide any single date that will tell you when the information was accurate; this must be inferred by the user.

The “accurate as of” date may be inferred from examining the following fields, only some of which may be populated in a given snapshot:

  • RNC Registration Date/RNC Registration Expiration Date (“Inscripción/Vencimiento en el RNC”). These fields update retroactively for all snapshots to match the dates of the company’s most recent snapshot. As a result, you may be examining a snapshot from 2002, but it might say it was registered in 2015.

However, if there is only one snapshot for the company in Sayari Graph, you can assume that the Inscripción/Vencimiento dates applied to this particular snapshot. This would imply that the snapshot was accurate as of the registration date, and ( assuming the company did not fail to update its details) as of the expiration date.

  • Incorporation and Statutory Modifications (“Acta Constitutiva y Modificaciones Estatutarias”). This table provides dates and details of instances in which the company filed documents with the Mercantile Registry. The first date is typically the date of incorporation (Acta Constitutiva). In addition, you may notice new rows in this table in more recent snapshots for a given company. The most recent date in this table comprises an “at least as recent as” date: the company’s visit to the registry must have occurred before the snapshot was filed.

  • Date of Accounting Opinion (“Dictamen de Auditoría – Fecha del Dictamen”). Similar to the Statutory Modifications table, this is an “at least as recent as” date. It provides the date on which the company’s books were most recently audited—an event that must have occurred before the snapshot was filed. We often find this to be the most recent date on any given snapshot, and therefore the most reliable as an approximate estimate of the snapshot’s filing date.

  • Contract start dates. You may see a list of contracts performed for public or private sector clients at the bottom of any given snapshot. For each contract, the start date represents another “at least as recent as” date; if the execution rate is above zero percent and that date is filled in, the project must have begun before the snapshot was filed.

What is included in a Venezuela Contractors Registry record?

Records can contain the following information (although some records may not contain all of this information, due to clerical errors or incomplete filings):

 

Field

Definition

RIF

Tax ID

RNC Certificate Number (Número de Certificado RNC)

Certificate number issued by the Registry. This identifier is not used outside the RNC.

RNC Registration Date (Inscripción en el RNC)

Date the company was most recently authorized or re-authorized to serve as a government contractor (see discussion of dates)

RNC Registration Expiration Date (Vencimiento en el RNC)

Date the company’s authorization or re-authorization period as a government contractor was most recently slated to expire (see discussion of dates)

Date of Accounting Opinion (Dictamen de Auditoría – Fecha del Dictamen)

Date of the company’s most recent audit (see discussion of dates)

Date of Content

Date Sayari collected this snapshot

Incorporation and Statutory Modifications (Acta Constitutiva y Modificaciones Estatutarias)

Dates on which the company submitted documents to the Mercantile Registry (see discussion of dates)

Related Parties (Accionistas, Miembros de la Junta Directiva y Representantes Legales)

Shareholders, board members, and legal representatives

Contracts (Relación de Obras y/o Servicios)

Contracts with clients of the company to which the snapshot pertains

Comisarios

Similar to an auditor, a financial oversight position common in Latin American countries

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