By: Garland M. Baker B.
Exclusive to A.M. Costa Rica
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Almost everyone with a company in Costa Rica is a bit frustrated and worried about filing their Registro de Transparencia y Beneficiarios Finales (register of transparency and final beneficiaries) report to comply with Law 9416.
For those late to the ballgame, all the ruckus is about the Costa Rican law approved Dec. 14, 2016, but effective this year. Those readers can refer to the articles “Time to fess up or pay up!,” published in Aug. 5, and “How to register for Law 9416,” published Sept. 2 for more information to get up to speed.
To sum up the news, Law 9416 was enacted to quash privacy for legal entities formed to protect secret investors. The Costa Rican government asserts it will only use the information it harvests to find tax cheats, drug dealers and terrorists.
The report is due Jan. 3. Hacienda (the tax department) will start dishing out fines next February for non-filers. That’s right, people have until the final due date to file. Many are confused about this fact because soft dates were published based on the last digit of a company’s identification number as its filing deadline. The soft dates were a guideline, so everyone would not file simultaneously by waiting until the last minute.
Filers are experiencing many problems, hampering their abilities to comply with the rules. Here are a few of them:
