Cyber Attacks to Costarican Government Institutions

As all the news sources nationally and internationally have announced in the last weeks, it’s been over a month since the day that the cyber attacks to the institutions of the government of Costa Rica and things are not getting much better regarding having their systems back to normal. Just last week, the CCSS (Social Security Institute of Costa Rica), they have been the last victim of the cyber terrorists, despite their system were working normally, in order to protect the databases and servers, the TI department decided on turning off their website in order to avoid any infections going through their servers.

Currently, the tax administration is not operating their online portal for filing the monthly tax forms, the taxes are being filed through draft forms and the taxes are paid manually with receipts generated by an old system enabled to be dowloaded from an external service. Since the connectivity between the online filing of the tax forms and the online banking is down, the receipts generated by the accountants should be taken by the tax payers to the bank, lining up in the banks to pay their taxes and swamping the banks with tax payers desperate to deliver their receipts and pay the taxes.

Another anoying contingency procedure is the one for new registrations, for new tax payers, unsuscriptions and changes in the business activities registered. Prior to the cyber attacks the way to make those paperworks was through the online portal and 100% of the paperwork can be submitted digitally, now the temporary procedure will be filling out a manual printed form and get the signature of the tax payer or legal representative in case of a corporation, those sigatures will need notarized not only by a notary but an attorney, this makes the paperwork hardly possible in the case that the tax payer or legal rep. is not in the country, in order to get this paperworks done being out of the country will be through a power of attorney to a thirdparty authorizing him to file the forms in behalf of the tax payer, a POA could go up to $400, which makes it very expensive to get. This situation affects the completion of the D-140 form in it’s 3 different types (modification, registration and unregistration) and D-101 form for inactive corporations.

In the above mentioned cases, and considering the amount of work and requests that the tax office is receiving manually, they have requested the tax payers that if there is no hurry to file those forms, it will be better to just wait until the online portals are back online. For the mentioned cases there will be no fines or sanctions, once the systems are back to normal they will grant 3 days to complete the paperwork, the Costarican Accountants Association is requesting them to change it to 20 days instead.

If you have an outstanding paperwork as the ones mentioned above you can request your accountant to keep you updated regarding the dates when the systems are back to normal.

In ConsultantsCR we can assist you with the compliance with the government institutions for you or your corporation, feel free to contact us anytime.