by Rod Hughes

Asignaciones Familiares, an important government welfare agency, finds itself unable to collect more than 66 billion colones (the colon is now about 487 per US dollar) to help some one million poor people. The daily paper La Nacion called the problem “a legal vacuum.”

A fund for the agency is charged with levying a 5% tax on the payroll of both private and public entities and obtain 20% of the total sales tax the government collects. Unfortunately, the Procruadora de la Republica, the agency that acts as the government’s civil lawyer, found in April, 2005, that legislation establishing the agency contained no legal tools to allow it to go after debtor companies and institutions.

At that time, the government lawyers suggested that the Social Security Administration (Caja), which already has a legal department practiced at collecting payments from deadbeat companies, take over the collections. But the bureaucrats at the Caja filed all manner of objections as to why they should not add to their workload.

So, three years later, the welfare agency finds itself unable to use the 66 billion for student scholarships to keep poor kids in school, to keep up senior citizens’ homes, and to lend a hand to indiginous peoples in remote areas, the poorest persons in the country.

Lawmaker Sergio Alfaro of the Citizen Action Party estimates that 93,000 employers are deadbeats and that 482 of them owe 25 billion alone. He called the Caja “negligent” in turning a deaf ear to pleas to help the agency out.