Although Airbnb offered to collect the sales tax for transactions made in Costa Rica through its platform, the Treasury is evaluating asking the US for information on the hosts.
The Directorate General for Taxation will try to exhaust all routes first with the company Airbnb, but as a second alternative, it has announced that if it does not reach an agreement with Airbnb, it could request information on the hosts, making use of international agreements for exchange of information with other governments, such as as the US.
The exemption of fines, interest and surcharges will will be in effect from May 20 and will last for three months for all taxpayers, whether natural or legal.
Diario de Centroamérica reports that "...The Agreement establishes terms to obtain between 100% and 90% exemptions.From that account, taxpayers who pay all their debts within the first month will receive a 100% reduction in fines, interest or surcharges; 95% for those paying in the second month, and 90% for the third month."
Under study in the Legislature are 26 bills involving new taxes, increases of some existing ones and redistribution of others.
An analysis piece by Nacion.com notes that the Legislative Assembly is currently considering 26 bills introduced during the current administration which in some way involve the issue of taxes."...Of the total projects, 50% are attempts to raise them or create a new type of tax or fees. "
The Directorate General of Taxation has hired an external service that cross matches taxpayer data in public databases to identify suspicious patterns that might suggest misconduct.
The project called Predictive Model started to be implemented by the Ministry of Finance of Costa Rica this year, and aims to analyze the behavior of firms and individuals in order to identify suspicious or unusual patterns in the process of declaration of income and tax payments.
The bill against tax fraud authorizes the Ministry of Finance to return up to 1% of sales tax paid by final consumers.
The return of that percentage, which would be a maximum of 1% of the general sales tax, would be subject to ranges and types of trading activity, as explained in the Bill to improve the fight against tax fraud.
A declaration of unconstitutionality has been given to the section of the tax code that allowed the Treasury to demand payment of penalties and interest allegedly owed on taxes before the right to a defense can be exercised.
The slowness and inefficiency with which the Taxation department processes tax disputes, sometimes involving decades before there is a resolution, led to the outlandish idea on the part of lawmakers of putting the cart before the horse.In order to solve the problem of stubborn evasions where people take advantage of the inefficiency of the Taxation department, a decision was made to take away from companies the right to contest the results of tax audits, forcing the taxpayer to pay the amounts ordered by these audits, within in a deadline of one month, in order to be able to initiate formal questioning of those results.Now, the Supreme Court of Costa Rica has taken away that power from the Taxation department, declaring it unconstitutional.
The proposal raises income tax from 25% to 29% for profits of over $38 billion a year, royalties for extracting gold and silver from 1% to 10%, taxes on fuels and a tax of $0.65 tax per bag of cement.
Seedocumentby the Ministry of Finance of Guatemala with details on each tax increase.
Due to a 12% increase in revenue in the first half of 2016 the fiscal deficit of the nonfinancial public sector fell by 80% compared to the same period in 2015.
From a statement issued by the Ministry of Economy and Finance:
The Minister of Economy and Finance, Dulcidio De La Guardia, presented today at a press conference the results of the Fiscal Balance of the Nonfinancial Public Sector (NFPS) and the Central Government, for the first half of 2016, highlighting a significant reduction in the deficit, which went from 647 million dollars in the first six months of 2015 to 129 million in the same period this year, representing a reduction of 519 million or 80.2%.
Due to the implementation of a new tax system, the government has postponed until August 31 the deadline for filing tax declarations and reports which were due on July 31.
From a statement issued by the Ministry of Economy and Finance:
The Directorate General of Revenue (DGI) at the Ministry of Economy and Finance wishes to reiterate to all taxpayers that because of the implementation of the new tax information system e-Tax 2.0, official financial statements and reports that were due for submission on July 31 may be submitted until August 31, 2016.
The agreement signed by the governments will be formalized in August in the city of Hanoi.
From a statement issued by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs:
The Republic of Panama and the Socialist Republic of Vietnam initialed an agreement on Friday to avoid double taxation, which will be signed by the appropriate authorities in the city of Hanoi in August.
Guatemalan agricultural exporters have questioned the measure taken by the Treasury to seize bank accounts in order to recover unpaid taxes, arguing that it is affecting their operations.
Arguing that the measure is attached to the law, the Tax Administration has defended its right to take injunctive measures such as seizing bank accounts in order to recover taxes that companies have stopped paying.
Optimization of the DGI's management practices has been cited as the cause of the 14.3% increase in tax revenue collection in the first half of the year.
From a statement issued by the Ministry of Finance:
The collection of tax revenue for the first half of the year increased by 14.3% compared to the same period in 2015, according to the latest preliminary report released today by the Directorate General of Revenue (DGI) at the Ministry of Economy and Finance (MEF).
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