Costa Rica Expertise LLC

By Garland M. Baker
Special to A.M. Costa Rica

Here is a yearly reminder. Education and culture taxes — Timbre de Educación y Cultura — are due next Monday, March 31.

Many people, including professionals, sluff off filing form D.110 and paying these taxes. However, paying them is required by Ley 5923, and every company in Costa Rica listed at the Registro Nacional is required to pay this tax. A company’s net capital amount determines the tax to be paid.

The tax amounted to quite a bit of money in 1976, the year the general assembly enacted the law. Today, the amount is almost insignificant and is a nuisance tax to most.

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By Garland M. Baker
Special to A.M. Costa Rica

The sign of things to come: Banco Cuscatlan now requires citizens or resident aliens of the United States to fill out a W9 form for personal accounts at the firm's banks in Costa Rica.

Why? Because Citigroup bought Grupo Cuscatlan from Corporación UBC Internacional S.A. for $1.51 billion in cash and stock. Grupo Cuscatlan has operations in El Salvador, Guatemala, Costa Rica, Honduras and Panamá.

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Justice and the Transparency Phantom are accompanied by the wolf-like tax police in execution of the new tax plan.

An analysis of the fiscal plan (4)

By Garland M. Baker
Special to A.M. Costa Rica

Transparency and Justice are teaming up and, using the synergy of information technologies and law, will surely prevail in collecting more taxes from everyone.

Transparency sits alongside Accountability, implying an openness and willingness to accept public scrutiny, decreasing the capacity for deception, as in hiding money from the tax people. Typically, transparency is used when discussing oversight of public officials. Now it is the individual citizen whose holdings and life is transparent. The concept has been referred to as the Transparency Phantom in a previous article.

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Accounts are open book to investigators

By Garland M. Baker
Special to A.M. Costa Rica

This is a scary story about a phantom called Transparency that is creeping secretly into everyone’s life. Thanks to Transparency, individual and corporate bank accounts are becoming open books for tax investigators from all over the world.

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Corporations have at least six of them

Believe it or not, these are the books of a corporation worth millions of dollars.

By Garland M. Baker
Special to A.M. Costa Rica

Everyone doing business or owning assets in Costa Rica using a company is required to have legal books.

The books, referred to in Spanish as libros legales, are obtained at the stationery store and then taken to the tax authority, Dirección General de Tributación or DGT for short. To obtain the agency’s blessing on the books, company operators fill out a form called Solicitud de Legalización de Libros. This translates into English as application to legalize books.

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