On July 9th, the full board of CREA-MG (the Engineering Council of Minas Gerais) ruled on an appeal filed by one of our clients — a multinational risk-consulting firm cited for allegedly failing to register with the council — and decided to void the citation, cancel the fine, and dismiss the case. The argument was simple, and the council accepted it: the company was already registered in another state and was in Minas Gerais only to carry out a three-month contract — a situation in which the law requires an endorsement of the existing registration, not a brand-new one. A mischaracterisation of the offence. Two almost-identical words were all that separated the fine from dismissal.
Citations from professional regulatory councils — CREA (engineering), CRM (medicine), CRF (pharmacy), CRC (accounting), CRA (business administration), COREN (nursing), CRECI (real estate), among others — are the kind of problem business owners underestimate the most. The citation looks like a mere notice, the initial amount seems small, and the document ends up in that drawer of things we'll “deal with later.” But the deadlines keep running regardless: an unchallenged fine becomes final, gets registered as active debt, is protested, collected through tax enforcement and, along the way, jeopardises certificates, bidding eligibility and contracts with major clients. The administrative stage is the cheapest and most effective one for challenging the merits — and it's exactly the one most often lost through silence.
Petereit Advogados has consolidated, well-recognised expertise in this field: defences and appeals before specialised chambers, regional plenary boards and federal councils; annulment lawsuits and objections to tax enforcement once the administrative route has been exhausted; and, above all, preventive work — reviewing the need for registration or endorsement, technical responsibility, the adequacy of the company's stated business purpose, and the regularity of its technical staff, before the regulator ever comes knocking. If your company or anyone on your team receives a citation from a professional council, send it to us before paying the fine just to “get rid of the problem.” As the Minas Gerais case showed, sometimes the mistake isn't the cited party's — it's the person who handled the case.
Petereit Advogados
