Some of you may remember the mass wedding ceremonies that we performed in February and March of 2015. At that time, we married about 140 couples with the intention of obtaining local marriage certificates from the Costa Rican Civil Registry, allowing them to avoid the hassle of obtaining a marriage

  You cannot talk about Costa Rican independence without reviewing Mexican History. Different than the American Colonies, Spanish Colonies were organized as kingdoms, specifically vice-royalties. Spain had four vice-royalties in the Americas, New Spain, Peru, Río de la Plata and New Granada. Costa Rica was a small province administered by

The first time I heard the word expat was when I was working at Fragomen, one of the largest Immigration Law Firms in the world. Fragomen is mainly dedicated to corporate immigration, which means that they charge an arm and a leg to multinational corporations to transfer their employees worldwide. It makes

The CR Congress approved a moratorium for the penalties to be imposed for non compliance with the new VAT imposed with the recent tax package. Please note that the moratorium is applicable only to the penalties to be imposed and the administrative proceedings (Proceedings by Hacienda against the business or

Some of you may recall the difficulties of getting spouses and children registered with CAJA, particularly due to the requirement to produce a marriage certificate or a birth certificate with no more than one month of issuance. This requirement made it literally impossible for people to register their spouses or

Two congress women put two separate bills in congress with the intention to charge additional taxes to tourist, as well as implementing other requirements.  One of the bills was brought by Shirley Díaz from the PUSC and the other by Paola Vega from PAC. The intention of the bills is

Most of you may be familiar with SINPE which is the account number used for wire transfers between accounts from different banks. The BCCR (The Costa Rican Central Bank) is implementing a change for the processing of these wire transfers.  The change will be implemented automatically and will be effective July

So, as some of you may know, we are in a constant battle with the Immigration Department or DGME (and other government agencies) to make them do their job. We have been working on the driver’s license, CAJA requirements, processing times for applications for residency, so on and so forth.

This is a recurring question among expats. We are going to address this issue from two perspectives, from a business perspective and from an expat perspective. Business Perspective Corporations have two primary purposes: To amass capital from different investors or partners for the furtherance of common business goals, and To

Under Law 9635, Law of Strengthening of Public Finances, published in La Gaceta on December 4, 2018, which establishes the validity of the implementation of VAT as of July 1 of 2019, we inform you of the following: New Value Added Tax (VAT) VAT taxes all sales of goods and