How to read a Korean business registration certificate
Updated
The 사업자등록증 is the document a Korean company sends to prove it exists. It is a single page, always in Korean, and three of its fields can be checked against government records.
It is issued by the National Tax Service when a business registers. Companies send it routinely when opening accounts with new customers, so asking for one is entirely normal and not something a legitimate supplier will find unusual.
The fields, in the order they appear
| Korean | Meaning | Verifiable? |
|---|---|---|
| 등록번호 | Registration number — the ten digits | Yes |
| 상호 | Trading name of the business | No |
| 성명 / 대표자 | Representative’s name | Yes |
| 개업연월일 | Date the business opened | Yes |
| 사업장 소재지 | Business address | No |
| 사업의 종류 | Industry classification — 업태 and 종목 | No |
| 교부일자 | Date this certificate was issued | No |
Three fields — the number, the representative’s name and the opening date — can be checked together against National Tax Service records. That check answers one specific question: do these three details belong to the same registered business? It is the closest thing to proving a certificate genuine.
What a certificate proves, and what it does not
A certificate proves a business was registered on the day the document was issued. Look at the 교부일자, the issue date. A certificate issued four years ago tells you nothing about whether the company trades today, and businesses close without withdrawing old paperwork from circulation.
This is the most common gap in supplier onboarding. A certificate is checked once at the start of a relationship and then filed. Meanwhile the supplier may suspend trading, change tax status, or deregister entirely — and nothing about the filed document changes.
Three things it never proves
- That the sender is connected to the business. A certificate is a document, and documents can be forwarded. It proves the business exists, not that you are talking to it.
- That the business is solvent. Registration is an administrative fact, not a credit assessment. A registered company can be deeply insolvent.
- That a bank account belongs to them. Nothing on the certificate relates to banking, and payment-redirection fraud relies on exactly this gap.
A status check takes seconds and tells you what the certificate cannot — whether the business is still trading today.
Check a number