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Colombia BIC companies: what it is and what it signals

A Sociedad de Beneficio e Interés Colectivo, or BIC, is a condition a Colombian commercial company elects for itself under Ley 1901 de 2018. It is not a certification and not an assessment of results. A company adopts it by amending its bylaws, adds the BIC abbreviation to its registered name, and takes on a duty to report annually on the collective benefit activities it chose.

Type

Legal forms and public registers

Run by

Colombia's chambers of commerce, which keep the mercantile register, with the Superintendencia de Sociedades as the competent authority on reporting standards

Since

2018

Headquarters

Colombia

Official site

https://www.mincit.gov.co/minindustria/sociedades-bic

Public list

https://www.datos.gov.co/d/hjhn-23mx

What the BIC form is

Ley 1901 de 2018, dated 18 June 2018, created the condition. Article 1 lets any existing or future commercial company of any type voluntarily adopt it. Article 2 is explicit that adopting the BIC name does not change the company type and does not change its tax position: a BIC company remains subject to the ordinary income tax regime, the common sales tax regime and other national, departmental and municipal tax obligations.

What a BIC company takes on is a purpose. It must write the collective benefit activities it intends to pursue into its corporate object, alongside its commercial activities, and carry the abbreviation BIC in its registered name. The law lists fifteen illustrative characteristics, from analysing pay gaps between the best and worst paid employees to running annual environmental audits.

Who runs it and since when

No single organization owns this label. Congress created it in 2018 and the national government regulated it through Decreto 2046 de 2019, dated 12 November 2019, which added a BIC chapter to the sector and tax regulatory decrees.

Registration sits with the chambers of commerce, which the decree notes keep the mercantile register under article 86 of the Commercial Code. The Superintendencia de Sociedades is the authority named in the law: it maintains a public list of the independent reporting standards that satisfy the statute, and it decides petitions asking it to declare that a company failed the standard it chose.

How an organization gets it

There is no application and no assessment to pass. Article 3 requires a statutory amendment, adopted by the majority the law or bylaws set for amending the corporate contract, both to take on the condition and to give it up.

The continuing obligation is a report. Under article 5 the legal representative presents to the company's highest corporate body a report on the impact of its management, covering the collective benefit activities carried out, inside the year-end report. It must be published on the company website; where there is no website, it must be available at the registered office and sent to anyone who asks in writing. Article 6 requires the report to follow an independent standard that is recognised, comprehensive, independent of the company and its parents, and transparent. It may be audited by the competent authorities or a third party.

What it signals, and what it does not

A BIC record tells a reader the company took a deliberate governance step: it amended its bylaws, wrote social and environmental purposes into its corporate object, changed its registered name and accepted an annual public reporting duty. Article 4 adds that purpose to the interests administrators must weigh alongside the company and its shareholders.

It is a self-elected status, so it certifies nothing about performance. Nobody scored the company before it became a BIC, no outside body verified its claims at the point of adoption, and the law lists its fifteen characteristics as illustrative rather than mandatory. The real test is the report: whether one exists, which independent standard it used, and whether it is published. A company can also stop being a BIC by the same amendment that made it one, so the label is reversible.

How to verify a claim

Start with the register. Colombia publishes no single national BIC list, but individual chambers of commerce publish their registered BIC companies as open datasets; the Pereira chamber's dataset carries the company name, identification and registration numbers, year of registration, CIIU activity code and municipality. Because coverage is per chamber, absence from one dataset is weak evidence.

Two stronger checks are open to anyone. First, the name: a BIC company must carry the BIC abbreviation or the words Beneficio e Interés Colectivo in its registered name, so a certificate of existence from the chamber of commerce will show it. Second, the report: if a company claims BIC status and publishes none, ask which independent standard it uses and where the report is filed.

Size and geography

Our copy of the public list holds 337 organizations across 1 countries, pulled 2026-09-14.

• Colombia 337

In the Tokens for Good directory

None of the organizations researched so far carries this label. Submit one, or contribute research with spare Claude capacity.

Frequently asked questions

Sources

1. Congreso de Colombia, Ley 1901 de 2018 (PDF, MinCIT) checked 2026-09-17
2. Presidencia de la República, Decreto 2046 de 2019 (PDF, MinCIT) checked 2026-09-17
3. MinCIT, Normativa BIC checked 2026-09-17
4. Datos Abiertos Colombia, Base de Datos Sociedades BIC (Cámara de Comercio de Pereira) checked 2026-09-17