The Costa Rican Drug Institute (ICD) carried out its first inventory of seized assets since its creation in 2001.

The entity cleaned, classified, appraised and stored each of the objects seized from drug traffickers.

“When I took over the direction of the ICD what existed at the time was an approximate count of the assets seized which came to more or less 26 thousand objects without any order and without any registry; since April 2015 we have been working on going over the seized objects from 1998 when the former National Drug Prevention Center used to be in charge of these assets through today. Going over all of these we realized there were a large number of assets seized that didn’t have any value such as broken appliances, mattresses and clothes. Some of these assets were disposed of through a formal act, others were sold with the help of the Treasury Department and its experts. Today, after a very long process, we have a registry with 15,531 assets that have some economic value”, confirmed Guillermo Araya, Director of the ICD.

The ICD invested close to US$400,000.00 in structural changes in their storage with the purpose of properly protect the objects. The Manual of Processes and Procedures was updated defining methods and controls for the reception, custody, protection, management and disposal of goods, defining tasks and accountability. Another US$36,000 was invested in computer equipment and servers.

As a result of this inventory, 1137 items were included that were not in any existing list; 790 assets are “missing” which they are currently trying to locate, among them 33 cars that were received by the ICD prior to 2010, furniture, tools, and computer equipment, among others. This process will continue through the first week of December and after this, the Director of the ICD will file the legal reports necessary to establish the responsibility over the missing objects.