In light of the country’s growing deficit and difficulties in funding its public budget, Costa Rica’s treasury is working on a number of fronts to tighten up controls and increase accurate tax payments throughout the country.

As part of this effort, they teamed up with the Agriculture and Livestock Ministry (MAG) to provide local governments with a tool that will allow them to enforce Law No. 9071, which regulates property taxes on farmlands, said José Rafael Corrales Arias, officer at the Economic Research and Information Department of the Executive Secretariat of Agricultural Sector Planning (SEPSA).

The joint program resulted in the creation of a digital platform which allows local governments to accurately assign property values to farms within their jurisdictions, and was launched on February 3, said Corrales. The tool is called “Plataformas de Valores Agropecuarios” in Spanish. The tool will also allow municipalities to accurately define land use within their territory and thus aid in protecting agricultural lands, said the MAG.

This new tool will allow for farms dedicated to agricultural and/or livestock production to be assessed based on their land use, amount of land under production, soil quality, slopage, irrigation, and other factors related to the land’s productivity.

The treasury said it is now up to each municipality to announce the implementation of this new digital tool through an official channel so that the process of land assessments can begin as soon as possible.

In order to begin using the tool, local governments must announce their plans to use the tool to re-assess lands either in the official newspaper “La Gaceta,” or in a newspaper with national circulation, such as La Nación or Diario Extra, said the treasury.

Such land assessments will allow tax values to be accurately calculated and then collected.

“We ask municipalities to announce the use of the new platform in their counties as soon as possible. And we ask the producers to approach their local governments, inform themselves, and start the process of updating data on their land. With this tool we also aid in preserving land for agricultural use,” said Agriculture and Livestock Minister Luis Felipe Arauz Cavallini.

“Law 9071 regulates the application of the Law on Property Taxes for Agricultural Land, with the objective of promoting the preservation land primarily devoted to agricultural and livestock production activities,” said Corrales.