The Costa Rican institution that channels lottery profits into a fifth of the country’s social protection spending did not report a single one of its 2024 and 2025 beneficiaries to the national registry built to track them, and moved â‚¡21,045 million — roughly $47 million — without the accountability reporting the law requires.
Those findings come from report DFOE-BIS-RF-00002-2026, in which the ContralorÃa General de la República examined whether the Junta de Protección Social can trace what happens to the information it collects about the people its money is meant to serve. The Comptroller concluded that the institution has not consolidated a process capable of gathering, validating and following up on that information.
The clearest illustration of what that failure looks like in practice is that 2,103 people who had died before the end of 2023 were reported as beneficiaries during 2024 and the first half of 2025 by private organizations receiving JPS funds. One of the records corresponded to a person who died in 1984. Removing the deceased from the database reduced the count of people served from 9,510 to 7,407.
Asked about the finding, the Junta de Protección Social said no resources were transferred directly to deceased people. According to the institution, the records reflect lags in the updating of information that private organizations submit about the beneficiaries of the programs financed with those funds.
Costa Rican law requires the JPS to direct a substantial portion of the net profit from lottery and games of chance toward social protection services. The institution does not deliver those services itself. It transfers money to private organizations, which are responsible for caring for the population. Between 2024 and the first half of 2025 alone, the JPS processed 5,312 transfers to 276 private entities totaling â‚¡24,883 million, about $55 million at current exchange rates, serving 7,407 people including older adults, minors, people with drug dependency and people with disabilities.
That scale places the JPS at the center of the audit. Although the Comptroller’s study covered other institutions that channel social assistance through private organizations, the JPS finances more of them than any other body — 276 of the 313 entities within the study’s scope — and the report identified more inconsistencies in its information than anywhere else. The institution accounted for 21.47 percent of all people who received social protection funds during the period examined.
Sinirube, the registry the JPS did not file to, exists to document who receives public assistance, the criteria by which they were selected, and the services they actually received with public money. Without those filings, the Comptroller found, it is not possible to verify the basic characteristics of the people served by privately run programs financed by the JPS, or to follow up on them.
The gaps run deeper than the missing registry entries. The JPS holds no record at all of the people served by 15 private organizations that received a combined ₡2,700 million, about $6 million, during the audited period. The Comptroller was unable to validate 461 beneficiary identification numbers reported by the institution because of formatting errors, after checking them against the records of the Supreme Electoral Tribunal and the immigration authority. Auditors also found the JPS lacks accounts in the Sistema de Cuentas del Sector Público, both for its own use and for the private organizations receiving its funds, a system designed to centralize transactions and improve traceability.
On the ₡21,045 million transferred without corresponding accountability reporting in the Sistema de Información sobre Planes y Presupuestos, the JPS responded that the observation concerns an administrative matter in how information is registered in that system rather than a failure to execute the spending. The institution told auditors it lacked the operational capacity to resolve the problems, and the Comptroller replied that the mechanisms must be strengthened and the flow of information to the system restored as regulations require.
In its formal response, the JPS said it accepts the observations with responsibility and openness and regards them as useful input for accelerating its digital and institutional transformation in the control of social transfers. The institution said the money Costa Ricans contribute through legal games is used effectively for those who need it most, and that it will strengthen training for the 276 organizations it finances so they make better use of national information platforms, raising standards of traceability and accountability.
The pattern is not confined to the JPS. A companion report in the same series, DFOE-BIS-RF-00001-2026, found that 483 people served by private organizations under the housing bond program administered by the Banco Hipotecario de la Vivienda had likewise not been reported to Sinirube, and raised comparable concerns about accounts in the public sector accounting system. The BANHVI has said it is reviewing each of those records individually and will seek to open the required accounts before the transition deadline expires.
For the JPS it is the second Comptroller finding this year. On April 30, a separate special audit found the institution had paid prizes on lottery fractions previously reported as unsold and destroyed, fractions that had been blocked in the system and then reactivated after the draw so the prize could be claimed.
The report does not allege theft or fraud, and no individual or organization has been accused of wrongdoing. The ContralorÃa’s argument is narrower than a corruption finding but harder to dismiss: the institution that distributes a fifth of Costa Rica’s social protection funding cannot currently demonstrate who received the services that money paid for, or whether the people listed as receiving them were alive.
