Against All Logic, the Issues With the Security Deposit for Residency

So, as some of you may know, we are in a constant battle with the Immigration Department or DGME (and other government agencies) to make them do their job. We have been working on the driver’s license, CAJA requirements, processing times for applications for residency, so on and so forth.

A recent issue that we got into has to do with the security deposits for residency. For those of you who are not aware, it is required to pay security deposit (it varies but generally it is $300 USD) once your residency is approved. You can become a permanent resident once you have been a temporary resident for three years, and you can rollover the security deposit from your temporary residency to your permanent residency.

For the seven years that we have been in business, we have not had issues with rolling over the security deposit from the temporary to the permanent residency, until recently. Over the past several months we have been receiving approvals for permanent residencies requesting the payment of the security deposit once again. This is not an issue exclusive to us as we have seen it happening in the expat community at large.

Specifically, the DGME requires you to request the refund of the money and to process the payment again. Why? Why don’t they just keep the money? Why make you do all of this to end up with the same result?

Well, we decided to formally request to the DGME an explanation to the illogical request. The inquiry was sent directly to the Legal Department to the DGME since this agency issued the regulation establishing the process to pay and request the refund of the security deposit.

This is their response: “the regulations command to Administration to obey (DGME) the laws notwithstanding their illegality or incompatibility with the logic” (see excerpt below).  Therefore, the government and in this case the DGME officially admits they develop and implement regulations regardless how illogical they will be.The DGME has no intention to modify the regulations or to be lenient about this. They were willing and able to leave this requirement unnoticed. We do not understand as to why they decided to enforce it now. The only explanation we can come up with is that the DGME is trying to increase their revenue.

As noted, the security deposit is about $300 USD and you processed the payment three years ago when you first obtained your temporary residency the amount would have been 160,000 (more or less) but if you process the payment today the amount would be 174,000 colones. The difference is $24 USD, which does not seem like much but to put it other perspective, just last year, the DGME approved 3,492 applications for residency which can represent about $79,000 USD. Still, it may not seem like a whole lot of money, but for a government with money issues, it will make sense that they will nickel and dime you every chance they get, even it is against all logic.