The Ministry of Finance and the state run power company ESPH have been denounced for anti competitive practices in the tender for an electronic invoicing system.
After the Ministry of Finance convened an ultra fast tenderand received only two bids for $27 million and $8 million to develop an electronic invoicing system, the union of technology companies has filed a complaint alleging anti-competitive practices.
In the tender to design and implement an electronic billing system for the Treasury, interested companies only have five working days in which to submit bids.
In a tender which requires, among other things, five years of experience in systems development, experience in project management and even a certificate from the Project Management Institute, Empresa de Servicios Público (ESPH) is only allowing five business days for interested companies to submit their proposals.
From the first half of next year, all professional people will have to use the mechanism that has the same validity as paper documents.
This was announced by Carlos Vargas, CEO of Taxation. The goal "... is to have a tool to verify professional people's income, which is important for determining income tax (which is applied on the difference between income and expenses)", reported Nacion.com.
The evaluation program for the system will involve 100 professionals who will start using electronic invoices.
Starting today, the Directorate General of Taxation is launching its pilot scheme for digital invoices which aims to increase the control of data, improving tax collection and reducing the use of paper.
According to Carlos Vargas, chief of the Directorate General of Taxation (DGT), "we are presenting the application for free.
The project will begin with a pilot program involving volunteer taxpayers from the professional sector.
Patricia Castillo, from the Department of Taxation, said the goal is to move to the implementation phase in the first four months of 2013, and upon which the participant base will be gradually expanded.
She added that electronic invoices "are a digital document similar to that used by telephone companies for their customers detailing the collections for cellular services", according to elfinancierocr.com.
In Costa Rica, three companies are using the electronic invoices system: Automercado, Cefa and Softland.
This regulation was proposed by GS1, together with the Treasury Ministry.
"Softland (formerly Exactus), included an electric invoices module in their ERP system one year ago, and started using it with their customers", reports Elfinancierocr.com. "According to them, they managed to increase collection and reduced credit notes in 50%".
The Costa Rica Institute of Electricity received proposals for $30.4 and $30.7 million from GBM and Soin respectively.
The renovation of the billing system is a part of a set of modernization projects to prepare the company, up to now a monopoly, for the opening of the telecommunications market.
Carlos Cordero Perez wrote in an article on Elfinancierocr.com that "The entity had already tried to modernize its billing system with a migration project from the Corporate Customer Service System (SIMO) and the Integral Telephone Management system (Gitel) which only cost $6 million.