The Costa Rica Legislature approved on March 10, 2022, a modification to the Tax Law which separates the definition of active companies for tax purposes versus those that are inactive.
As a result of this modification the requirement that all inactive companies file a regular tax return form D-101 has been extended for three months. During that time the law requires the tax department to come up with a concise and simple form for inactive companies to disclose assets, liabilities, and capital structure. The intent of this new law is to simplify this filing. As such, no more rush to file this form by March 15th since you have an additional three months. In the interim, we shall see how the tax department deals with this change and what type of form it develops.
The full version of the law in English is provided below for further review.
TAX SIMPLIFICATION FOR NON-ACTIVE LEGAL ENTITIES
ARTICLE 1- Article 2, subsection a) of Law 7092, Income Tax Law, of April 21, 1988, is hereby amended. The text will now read as follows:
Article 2- Taxpayers
Regardless of the nationality, domicile, and place of incorporation of legal entities or of the meeting place of their board of directors or of the execution of contracts, all public or private companies that carry out activities or businesses of a lucrative nature in the country are considered taxpayers:
(a) All legally constituted legal entities, regardless of whether or not they carry out a lucrative activity, de-facto companies, professional activity companies, State companies, collective entities without legal personality, and joint venture participation agreements existing in the country.
Inactive companies are exempted from the application of the provisions of the previous paragraph, which will be under the obligation to provide to the Tax Administration only the summary information of any increases in their assets, liabilities, and capital structure. In this case, the informational tax declaration must be concise and simple, in such a way that the cost of compliance is minimized. If there is no variation in the information provided from one year to the next then the annual declaration will be understood to be made by confirming that the existing information has not changed.
In the case of non-domiciled entities that have a legal identification number beginning with 3-012, and do not carry out any activity in the country, they may request the National Registry to eliminate the legal identification number issued to them, without prejudice to the validity of any act or contract subscribed prior to the elimination of the referenced identification number.
(…)
ARTICLE 2- A new transition provision is added to Law 7092, Income Tax Law, of April 21, 1988. The text is as follows:
Transitory VI– For compliance with the provisions of paragraph a) of Article 2, referring to the informative declaration of inactive companies, these shall have an extension of time of three months as of the entry into force of this law to complete the filings.
You can download the original Spanish version of the legislative bill here:
