How to Verify a Vietnamese Supplier Without Visiting

The deposit invoice has arrived. You are holding a company profile, a quotation, an ISO certificate saved as a JPEG and photographs that could have been taken anywhere, and you are being asked to wire money to an entity in a country you cannot reach this month. Below is the order we check that entity in from a desk in Ho Chi Minh City, and where a check becomes a refusal.

What is specific to Vietnam is the names of the fields, which record is authoritative, and which mismatches are artefacts rather than warnings — plus two changes from 2025 that the older English checklists have missed.

💬 Want a second pair of eyes on the documents before the deposit goes out? Tell us what you are buying and we will read them with you.

Which number do you ask for first?

Ask for the enterprise code — mã số doanh nghiệp — before anything else, because since 1 July 2025 it has also been the company’s tax code, which makes it the one number tying the certificate, the quotation, the contract and the bank instruction to a single legal person.

Article 8(1) of Decree 168/2025/ND-CP, signed 30 June 2025 and in force from 1 July 2025, gives each enterprise one code that is simultaneously its tax code, and Article 6(3) makes the enterprise registration certificate serve as the tax registration certificate too. It replaced Decree 01/2021/ND-CP. Checked against the published texts on 15 September 2026. So the older instruction — a registration number, then separately a tax number — is now wrong. If a supplier gives you two numbers, ask which document each came from.

Three addresses, all free:

• dangkykinhdoanh.gov.vn — the National Business Registration Portal, run by the Ministry of Finance, with its lookup at dichvuthongtin.dkkd.gov.vn. Type the enterprise code into the search box. The free tier returns the registered name, code, status, legal form, establishment date, legal representative, head-office address and registered business lines; certified extracts are a paid product.
• tracuunnt.gdt.gov.vn — the tax authority’s taxpayer lookup, where the same number should sit against the same registered name.

Do not accept a screenshot of a search result; that is a document the supplier controls, and the point is to read one they do not.

What has to agree with what?

Work down this table — each document a supplier sends is one half of a pair, matched against the registration record you pulled yourself.

The address does not match. Is that a problem?

Usually not — Vietnam moved to a two-tier local government in 2025 and the district tier stopped existing, so an older certificate can legitimately name a ward and district that no longer exist.

Law No. 72/2025/QH15 on Organisation of Local Government puts administrative units on two tiers, province and commune or ward, and ends district-level People’s Councils and People’s Committees from 1 July 2025. Resolution No. 202/2025/QH15 cut 63 provincial units to 34. Address text changed nationwide. On 5 April 2025 the Ministry of Finance issued Official Letter 4370/BTC-DNTN on business registration where administrative boundaries change: where only the administrative name has changed and the actual address has not, updating the record is something an enterprise may do when it wishes rather than something required of it.

The certificate is older than the boundary, so it and the record describe one building in two vocabularies. The test is whether the street number, street and city are the same physical place, and whether it is the one you are shown on video.

Manufacturer or trading company?

Neither is a problem in itself, but an undisclosed one is — and the registered business lines that settle it are not printed on the certificate you were emailed.

Article 28 of the Law on Enterprises No. 59/2020/QH14, as amended by Law No. 76/2025/QH15 in force from 1 July 2025, lists what the certificate contains: the company name and enterprise code, the head-office address, the legal representative’s details, and charter capital. Business lines are not on that list.

So “check the business scope on the certificate they sent you” is bad advice — you look, find nothing, and conclude the document is fake. The lines live in the registration record, which the free portal lookup shows. Read whether the registration covers manufacturing of your category, or only wholesale and import-export.

Trading-only registration from someone who has called themselves the factory is not fraud; it is an undisclosed party in the chain, which changes who controls quality and who can accept a specification change. We say this as a trading company ourselves — we own no factory, and we say so on the first call.

💬 Sunsho Trade works in English, Japanese and Vietnamese and reads these documents in the original. See how our sourcing service handles supplier checks, or send us the enterprise code and we will pull the record.

Who is allowed to sign the contract?

A legal representative named in the record, or someone holding a written authorisation from one that you have read before signature — and where the record names more than one, which of them can bind the company is a charter question.

Article 12(2) of the Law on Enterprises lets a limited liability company or a joint stock company have one or more legal representatives, and makes the company charter fix the number, the management titles and the rights and obligations of each. Where there is more than one and the charter does not divide those rights, all of them are jointly liable to the company for damage caused.

Two names is therefore not a warning sign; it is a reason to ask for the relevant part of the charter. Where the signature block shows a sales manager, or a director not in the record at all, ask for the authorisation before signature rather than after.

How do you check a certificate you cannot touch?

Look the certificate number up in the issuing scheme’s own public register, not in the PDF and not through a link the supplier sends you.

Two notes. The International Accreditation Forum and ILAC were replaced on 1 January 2026 by Global Accreditation Cooperation Incorporated, and iaf.nu now calls itself a legacy site, so check who operates it. The Bureau of Accreditation — Văn phòng Công nhận Chất lượng, or BoA — sits under the Ministry of Science and Technology; if the laboratory on your test report is not listed, ask what accreditation it holds.

If you are going the other way and putting a supplement onto the Vietnamese market yourself, the route is in the declaration route for food supplements, and the Vietnamese sub-label that follows it in the supplementary label checklist. Health supplements are foods, not medicines, and are not a substitute for medical treatment.

Scope and site are where genuine certificates mislead: a real ISO 9001 certificate may cover a different plant in the same group, or cover assembly while your part is moulded. Where the issuer is a government body with no public list, put the request in writing to that authority, naming the document and its reference number.

What about the bank details?

The account holder must be the registered Vietnamese-language name — and an English name on the invoice is not, by itself, the mismatch to worry about.

Under Article 39 of the Law on Enterprises the foreign-language company name is a translation of the Vietnamese name into a Latin-script language, and is itself a registered field — so a letterhead reading one way in English and another in Vietnamese is usually two registered names of one company. Write both down from the record, Tên công ty viết bằng tiếng Việt and Tên công ty viết bằng tiếng nước ngoài, and match the payment instruction against the Vietnamese one. That an enterprise account here is normally held in that name is practice as we see it, not a rule we can cite.

The genuinely bad shapes are different: a personal account in a staff member’s name, an affiliate in a third country nobody mentioned, or a late email saying the usual account is under audit. Confirm any change of banking details by voice, on a number you had before the change was proposed.

What should the video walk actually show?

The frames a rented meeting room cannot produce, starting with the signboard at the gate, which under the Law on Advertising carries the name on the business registration certificate.

Article 34 of the Law on Advertising No. 16/2012/QH13 requires a business signboard to carry the establishment’s name as it appears on its business registration certificate, with the address and telephone number. Law No. 75/2025/QH15 amended that law from 1 January 2026, and we could not confirm on 15 September 2026 whether Article 34 itself changed — confirm it against the current text before you rely on it. Either way the sign should read as the Vietnamese registered name, not the English trading name on the quotation.

Decide the rest on the call, not in the email that arranges it, and give minutes rather than a day:

• The signboard at the entrance, held still long enough to transcribe, with the street name and number beside it.
• The registration certificate on the office wall, held still enough to read the enterprise code against the record.
• Today’s production board, in Vietnamese, dated today, and the line your order would run on.
• A machine nameplate with its serial number, and the paperwork attached to it — calibration labels, maintenance sheets and shift records, in Vietnamese and specific to that line.
• The fire-safety equipment and any posted fire-safety documentation, which tells you whether the room behaves like somewhere inspected.

If the person holding the phone is not on site today, that is also an answer.

What none of this can tell you

A remote check verifies identity, authority and paperwork — not capacity under load, not subcontracting, and not what the factory does when your drawing is ambiguous at ten at night.

Those failures surface in the first order. Reduce it by pinning the specification down before anyone quotes — how to compare Vietnamese supplier quotations — and by knowing which costs sit on which side of the handover, so a first small order brings no surprise invoice: Vietnam local charges by Incoterm. If the contract may go before an authority abroad, settle its authentication early: apostille or consular legalisation.

💬 If you would rather someone physically here did the walk, the sign check and the document matching, that is our sourcing work. Start with the supplier you already have.

Frequently asked questions

1. Is a company profile with photographs and certificates enough to start production?
No. Every item in it is produced by the supplier. Use it for the enterprise code, the registered name and the certificate numbers you verify elsewhere.

2. The supplier emailed me a scanned certificate. Is that what I should be checking?
It is the document you take the enterprise code from, not the one you rely on. A certificate is a snapshot as at its printed date; the record is the current state. Where the two disagree on anything but administrative naming, the record wins.

3. They handed me two documents, an ERC and an IRC. What is the second one?
An Investment Registration Certificate. Under Article 37(1) of the Law on Investment No. 61/2020/QH14 a foreign investor’s project goes through the IRC procedure and Article 37(2) exempts a domestic investor’s, so a foreign-invested supplier holds both and a Vietnamese-owned one only the ERC. Do not demand an IRC from a supplier who would never hold one.

4. Should I insist on dealing with the factory rather than a trading company?
Not necessarily. A trading company that says what it is, names the manufacturing site and takes responsibility for quality can be easier to work with than a factory with no export-facing staff. The problem is finding an undisclosed one after you have paid.

5. The supplier has a verified badge on a large B2B marketplace. Can I skip this?
No. A badge tells you the platform ran a check to its own standard, at some point, for its own purposes. It does not tell you the registered name matches the account you are about to pay.