The Finance Ministry announced Tuesday that it plans to provide national banks and financial institutions with a list of persons and businesses that have failed to pay taxes. The list would include the credit history for each delinquent tax payer.
“Reporting the names of the people and entities that have incomplete tax payments to the financial entities and banking institutions will provide banks with a risk profile of clients and companies when approving credit lines,” said a statement from the Finance Ministry. “This is one of the new measures that will be applied by Costa Rica’s Tax Administration to combat the lack of debt payments with the treasury.”
The statement said that names the Finance Ministry hopes to provide banks the names of delinquents beginning in November.
Since his appointment in February, Francisco Villalobos, the general director of Costa Rica’s Tax Administration, has been on a mission to reduce the rate of national tax evasion, estimated at around 60 percent by the Comptroller’s Office in 2010. Villalobos has helped develop a system for online tax payments at http://dgt.hacienda.go.cr, closed dozens of national businesses in September for improperly reporting sales taxes, and recently installed a monthly and quarterly tax payment system to ease year-end lump sum payments.
Villalobos added that the list will assist banks and financial institutions to make informed decisions about clients and businesses interested in opening credit lines.
“We will be updating the list every year and will continue to inform the public, by all means possible, about their obligation to pay taxes,” Villalobos said.
