The General Directorate of Taxation and the Costa Rican Institute on Drugs, through joint resolution No. DGT-ICD-R-19-2020 of August 6th, 2020, published in the official gazette La Gaceta No. 201 on August 13th, 2020, resolved that due to the impact of COVID-19, the obligation to present the annual declaration of the Registry of Shareholders and Final Beneficiaries (RSFB) is postponed to April, and not during the month of September as initially established.
According to the resolution, the legal entities that filed the 2019 declaration in the RSFB system will not have to submit the 2020 declaration, since the system will automatically and for this time only, have said declaration as the corresponding one to the 2020 period. Thus, for legal entities that have not submitted the declaration for the 2019 period, they must do so as soon as possible, for the same rule to apply.
For the following annual declarations, the system will automatically preload the last declaration filed. Therefore, the obligated parties may update the declaration, or confirm that the information has not changed. In this case, the previously uploaded files will not have to be updated in the system, except as required by the Tax Administration.
In relation to companies incorporated between January 1, 2020 and March 31, 2021, they should not file the declaration within the following 20 days, and instead, for this time only, should file it in the month of April 2021. For the following periods, newly incorporated companies must present the ordinary declaration within 20 business days following their incorporation at the National Registry.
Legal entities that must submit extraordinary declarations or make corrections to the ordinary declaration corresponding to the 2019 period, must do so in the annual declaration that must be filed in April 2021. However, in accordance with the mentioned resolution, for the following periods, an extraordinary declaration must be submitted within 15 business days following the entry in the legal books or registry, when any of the shareholders owns an amount equal to or exceeding 15% of the total of the respective type of shares, whether they are common, preferred or other, or there are variations in the final beneficiaries by other means of control.
Trusts, third-party resource managers, and non-profit organizations, which are not yet required to file the declaration in the RSFB system, must keep the information in accordance with the provisions of the Law to Improve the Fight against Fiscal Fraud and deliver it to the Tax Administration when required.
In case you have questions or require assistance with the Registry of Shareholders and Final Beneficiaries declaration, you can contact us and we will gladly assist you.