Yearly Company Shareholder Declaration (“RTBF”).
Update as of April, 2022.
As of 2019, the Costa Rican government implemented the requirement for all legal entities, trusts, limited liability companies and corporations domiciled in Costa Rica, with some minor exceptions, of submitting a yearly affidavit pertaining to shareholders and beneficial ownership (more info here, in Spanish only).
The information submitted in the affidavit is is to be treated as confidential. It will only be used for internal tax purposes, such as controlling payment of capital gains taxes and anti-money laundering.
The filing is referred to in Spanish as the Declaración sobre Registro de Transparencia y Beneficiarios Finales (“RTBF”). There literal translation into English is “Declaration concerning Transparency Registry and Final Beneficiaries” and it is more commonly referred to as the “shareholder declaration” or “shareholder affidavit“.
The deadline for the 2022 filing is April 30th. The filing must be completed by the end of April every year thereafter or whenever there is a significant change of ownership. Failure to submit the affidavit by these deadlines carries hefty monetary penalties: up to 2% of the entity’s gross income, with a minimum of 3 so-called “base salaries” (each salary is roughly ~$1,000, for a total minimum fine of ~$3,000).
The filing must be done in a secured only platform implemented by the Costa Rican Central Bank (“BCCR”) (available here) by the company’s legal representative. The person that does the filing on behalf of the company must have a government-issued certificate of encryption of digital ID. Foreign nationals without legal residence in Costa Rica normally do not have access to this document.
All clients, especially those without a digital ID, are strongly suggested to contact us to coordinate completion of this requirement.
First published on January 15th, 2020.
