President of Costa Rica, Carlos Alvarado and the Minister of Treasury, Rocio Aguilar, announced today the plan to battle tax evasion, through which they expect to collect taxes by end of this year for an estimated amount of $88 million that have gone uncollected.

The information was shared in a press conference held this Wednesday, June 20, at the Presidential House. The plan includes 10 strategies and the implementation of technological tools to control evasion as well as legal administrative actions and the work of the Fiscal Control Police.

Among the measures contemplated are, the collection of approximately $132 million owed by 800 contributors, debts that are already in the judiciary collection stage, for this, the government will move forward with the repossessions and embargos to imports, rental payments, ticket sales of public events, and any other credit in favor of the debtors.
Complying with this plan, Treasury already acted the case of a company that owed an important amount, through the repossession of raw materials, through this action the company paid off over $2.2 million.

“Another action is the plan to collect the amounts transferred by error to retirees after their death; this action will be carried out in coordination with the National Directorate of Pensions. For example, just 11 cases like this will represent the collection of more than $417 thousand dollars”, explained Aguilar.

The Fiscal Control Police will be in charge of running at least 1000 operations during the second semester of 2018.

When it comes to customs, the Government will be implementing a new automated process for the revision of merchandise which will radically change the manual process used today.
Tax control will also include the revision of 117,000 contributors to determine why they declared in the past year zero taxes, and will include actions over 1500 contributors that are not complying with their obligation for the emission of electronic invoices.

President Alvarado commented that “controlling evasion requires the actions of everyone”.