Due diligence on a Romanian company: the complete checklist

You are about to sign a contract, wire an advance or onboard a supplier in Romania, and you need to know who you are dealing with. The good news: Romania keeps most company data in public registers, and every question on a standard due-diligence checklist has an official answer. The bad news: the registers are scattered across half a dozen institutions, almost everything runs in Romanian, and some of the sources that matter most are the least obvious. This page is the map. Each step below links to a guide that goes deeper, so you can work through the list in half an hour.

Step 1: does the company legally exist?

Start with the tax ID (CUI) from the contract or invoice, and check that the company is registered and still alive. Romanian companies die in two ways, struck off (radiată) or suspended, and both keep appearing in old documents and on stale websites long after the fact. If your counterparty cannot give you a CUI at all, stop here; every legitimate Romanian business has one. What the identifiers mean, including the J number and the RO prefix, is covered in our guide to Romanian company numbers.

Step 2: registration data, directors and shareholders

The Trade Register certificate (certificat constatator) is the core document: registered details, status, directors and the direct shareholders with their stakes. It is what a Romanian bank or lawyer pulls first, and ONRC issues it without any access test. How to read it and how to get it in minutes is in the guide to the Trade Register extract; if your question is specifically about people, start with finding a company's directors and shareholders. Where shareholders are themselves companies, the formal answer is the UBO extract.

Step 3: is it VAT-registered, and is the VAT code valid?

A Romanian company quotes VAT on its invoices only if its VAT registration is current, and ANAF cancels VAT codes far more often than foreigners expect. A supplier whose VAT code was cancelled is a red flag with direct financial consequences for you. The check takes a minute and is free: see verifying a Romanian VAT number. While you are at it, check the company is not on ANAF's list of fiscally inactive companies, a status that voids your right to deduct their invoices.

Step 4: can it actually pay?

Romanian companies file annual financial statements that become public: turnover, profit, employees, debt. Five minutes with the numbers answers the question no reference letter will: is this a real business of the size they claim? The data and where to find it are in financial statements of Romanian companies, and the warning signs worth taking seriously are collected in company red flags. Outstanding debts to the state have their own trail, covered in checking a company's debts.

Step 5: insolvency and litigation

Insolvency in Romania is published, case by case, in an official bulletin, and lawsuits sit in a searchable court portal. A company can look alive, keep invoicing and still be months into insolvency proceedings, so this step is not optional for larger contracts. See checking for insolvency and checking court cases.

Step 6: who is really behind it?

For KYC files, compliance questionnaires and any deal where ownership matters, the ultimate beneficial owner comes from the UBO register held by ONRC. Public access was restricted in 2022, which is why this is the step where foreign compliance teams usually get stuck; the ways around the restriction, including the one that works from abroad, are in the UBO register guide. If you are assembling a file for a bank or a regulator, the exact document list is in KYC documents for a Romanian company.

Doing it free versus doing it fast

Almost every check above has a free official source, listed with links in how to check a Romanian company for free. The catch is that the free route runs in Romanian, spreads across six websites, and for the two documents that compliance teams actually ask for, the Trade Register certificate and the UBO extract, the foreign resellers that serve this market in English charge serious money: an ONRC extract for €35 plus VAT with hours of waiting at the cheaper end, a UBO extract for €100 plus VAT, and flat fees of £258 or $262 at the full-service end, sometimes without the UBO document at all.

We are the Romanian shortcut: the registration certificate is 79 RON, about €16, in roughly ten minutes; the UBO extract is 149 RON, about €29; the instant check, a verdict report drawn from the official sources with a 0-100 trust score, is 39 RON, about €8, in one minute. The complete bundle, all three in one order, is 219 RON, about €42. Everything is ordered in English, paid by card and delivered by email, and the ONRC documents come electronically signed by the institution itself, which is what makes them originals.

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