by Ivo Henfling
If you have a Costarican driver’s license, no matter if you have legal residency or not, you should read the following information.
In the past, when the Costarican transit police would write out a ticket, it would go to the tag of the car. In December, when you’d pay your road taxes, you’d get the charges of tickets of the whole year. COSEVI, the Road Safety Counsil of Costa Rica is installing cameras on the highway to control speeding and have no way to hand out the tickets to the drivers personally.
This has changed now and by traffic law # 9078, all 1.1 million drivers in Costa Rica need to give the authorities their email address, so the tickets will be charged to their drivers’ license.
This new traffic law ( Ley de Tránsito N. 9078) obliges us all to fill out a form that you can download here, and then print it, I translated it for you in the same file. Make sure you send the Spanish version to the traffic authorities, together with a copy of your cedula, cedula de residencia or passport.
Fill out the Spanish version and submit the form before the deadline on April 26, 2013 to ANY of the following offices:
* COSEVI Central offices – La Uruca/San Jose, westside of Banco National phones 2257-7200, 2257-7006, 2257-7018
* Transit Police Stations, find them all here
* Driver License offices in San Jose as well as all regional license offices, find them all here
* RITEVE Stations, find map with RITEVE locations here
Digital signature
If you have already your digital signature registered, you can send this form with your digital signature to the following email
If you don’t, print it, sign, scan the sign form and send it with a copy of your scanned ID to the same email address
If you have a bank account in Costa Rica and a SINPE, you already have a digital signature.
I DO recommend you take the form with an extra copy to any of the offices mentioned above and have them stamp your copy as received, so you have proof you submitted the information on time. Sending the document through cyberspace might get it lost.
Responsible or not
Costarican citizens and residents where automatically notified as soon as the change in the law was published in La Gaceta, the official governmental newspaper. So no matter if you have read about the obligation or not, you are automatically responsible described by Article 149 not only to submit the form but also to update your email address annually as well as within 10 days of any changes that might occur in your personal information.
You should whitelist the direccionelectronicavial@csv.go.cr email address so any notifications they send can end up in your spambox and you will not see them, which would be your responsibility. Once Cosevi has sent you the notification, they will see it as notified.
If you would like to check if you have any traffic tickets in Costa Rica, on this COSEVI link you can check by tag number, driver’s ID number, ticket number and corporate ID number.
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