QCOSTARICA — Costa Rica’s customs service (Dirección General de Aduanas) assures that everything is ready to begin collecting taxes on all purchases made online, from portals such as Amazon and China to large imports.
The general director of that department of the Ministry of Finance, Cristian Montiel, confirmed that this is “a decision that has been made,” but that it is pending fine-tuning via regulation.
The change will be part of what Hacienda Digital and the new system that will replace TICA will bring.
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“Today you subscribe to Netflix and they charge you taxes right away, well, that is what we want to achieve, that once purchases are made internationally, we can collect the tax and we would no longer have to chase people.
“It is already a decision made by the office, where we have analyzed the different strategies we are going to take in each of the processes, working directly with the platforms to be able to make that (tax) collection or find some way through the system or through this modification that we are going to make in the systems to be able to make this collection directly,” Montiel said.
The tax authority described Costa Rica as a “success story” in the world on how to pursue the evasion of companies that have businesses in the country without being registered as taxpayers.
The tax collection, according to the director, will target both small purchases in retail markets, to large imports made by individuals or legal entities, for example, outlets.
Montiel said that this is a possibility that exists since the entry into force of the Ley de Fortalecimiento de las Finanzas Públicas (2019) – Law to Strengthen Public Finances – and that its instrumentalization would be similar to what happens today with the so-called cross-border collections.
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The director said he did not know why the Treasury has not made progress in this collection and acknowledged that, personally, his idea arose from the example of Brazil.
“This is a better international practice, Brazil has already implemented a similar scheme. I talked about it with the general director of Customs of Brazil and she explained to me how it worked and how they had gone from collecting a very low percentage of 5% in the postal issue to almost 90% with this method.
“But it is not a question of whether it was done badly or not, the issue is that it is good to be immersed and up to date with everything that happens in trade and in customs to see new and better practices where we can replicate, and tropicalize, all those practices that are carried out and are giving good results in other countries,” he added.
Brazil decided, in 2023, to eliminate the exemptions that existed for imports of up to US$50 precisely to combat retail trade in large digital markets, especially from China, which was dominating the local market without leaving anything to the State.
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Montiel insisted that these details have not yet been defined, but that the changes could come from January, when the deployment of the new systems that the Digital Treasury will bring is planned.
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