Costa Rica

This jurisdiction is special in the sense that the the government does not consider online gambling to be taking place at the location of the gaming servers but instead at the place where the player is interacting with the gaming software. Thus it has had little use or incentive to introduce effective gambling legislations and as long as gambling companies do not offer their services to local residents, they’re virtually free from scrutiny. That may explain why Costa Rica has been a favourite destination and operations centre to hundreds of legal and illegal online gaming companies. Currently there are approximately over 230 such companies operating from this Central American country.

The lack of a proper gaming legislation does not only result in companies self-regulating their activities, lack of monitoring and testing but also (and to the delight of most of these companies) to no gaming tax collection. Online gaming sites are registered as “data processing” companies and are licensed as such.

One local political party, the “Partido Accion Ciudadana” meant to introduce a bill in late 2007, that would tax online gaming operations but based on the number of people these companies employed. And in 2009, the finance ministry proposed a bill to regulate and tax online gaming companies based in Costa Rica.

Neither bill passed into legislation and have become part of what has been an ongoing and lengthy process of attempting to regulate this industry in the small republic of Costa Rica.