LATAM Company Registry Scraper — Ecuador & Costa Rica Tax ID

Scrape official Latin American company registries and get one normalized record per entity — whatever country the tax ID came from. Paste a mixed list of Ecuadorian RUCs and Costa Rican cédulas; the Actor works out which registry each one belongs to and returns the same schema for both.

Currently covering Ecuador (SRI) and Costa Rica (Ministerio de Hacienda), with more of the region on the way.

The part other sources don't give you

Latin American tax authorities publish their own fraud and delinquency designations. Those are the fields due diligence actually turns on, and they are collapsed here into one comparable set:

Flag	Meaning	Published by
ghostTaxpayer	Officially designated shell company (contribuyente fantasma)	Ecuador
nonExistentTransactions	Invoices found to cover transactions that never happened	Ecuador
taxDelinquent	Owes taxes (moroso)	Costa Rica
nonFiler	Failed to file required returns (omiso)	Costa Rica
suspended	Registration suspended or struck off	both

Every record carries hasRiskFlag and riskFlagsRaised, so a reviewer can sort a 5,000-row export by risk in one click instead of learning four registries' vocabularies.

A flag a country does not publish stays null — never false. Costa Rica does not designate ghost taxpayers, and reporting that as "no ghost flag" would be a false clean bill of health.

Output

{
  "country": "EC",
  "countryName": "Ecuador",
  "identifier": "1790016919001",
  "identifierType": "ruc_company",
  "legalName": "CORPORACION FAVORITA C.A.",
  "entityType": "company",
  "status": "active",
  "statusOriginal": "ACTIVO",
  "mainActivity": "VENTA AL POR MAYOR DE OTROS PRODUCTOS DIVERSOS PARA EL CONSUMIDOR.",
  "taxRegime": "GENERAL",
  "registeredSince": "1957-11-30",
  "registryUpdatedAt": "2026-08-18",
  "obligations": {
    "mustKeepAccounting": true,
    "isWithholdingAgent": true,
    "isSpecialTaxpayer": true
  },
  "riskFlags": {
    "ghostTaxpayer": false,
    "nonExistentTransactions": false,
    "taxDelinquent": null,
    "nonFiler": null,
    "suspended": false
  },
  "riskFlagsRaised": [],
  "hasRiskFlag": false,
  "representatives": [
    { "identification": "1701529958", "name": "WRIGHT DURAN BALLEN RONALD OWEN", "role": "legal_representative" }
  ],
  "headOfficeAddress": "PICHINCHA / RUMIÑAHUI / COTOGCHOA / AV. GENERAL ENRIQUEZ S/N",
  "establishmentCount": 327,
  "source": "SRI — Servicio de Rentas Internas del Ecuador",
  "sourceUrl": "https://srienlinea.sri.gob.ec/sri-en-linea/SriRucWeb/ConsultaRuc/Consultas/consultaRuc?ruc=1790016919001",
  "scrapedAt": "2026-08-27T15:04:11.000Z",
  "found": true
}

Costa Rican records use the same keys, filling activities with the authority's full primary/secondary activity list and taxOffice with the administering tax office.

Coverage

Country	Source	Returns
🇪🇨 Ecuador	SRI — Servicio de Rentas Internas	Legal name, status, activity, regime, obligations, legal representatives with national ID, every branch with address, ghost-taxpayer flags
🇨🇷 Costa Rica	Ministerio de Hacienda	Legal name, registration status, full activity list with codes, tax regime, administering office, delinquency and non-filer flags

Input

Field	Type	Default	Notes
identifiers	array	—	Mixed-country tax IDs. Formatting ignored. Prefix EC: or CR: to force a registry. A 10-digit Ecuadorian cédula is completed to a RUC.
countries	array	both	Restrict routing to selected registries.
includeEstablishments	boolean	true	Ecuador only: adds every branch with address.
includeRaw	boolean	false	Attaches the untouched registry payload for auditing.
skipInvalidChecksum	boolean	false	Off by default — registries hold historical records that predate today's rules.
verifyNotFound	boolean	true	Confirms a miss against a second endpoint so an outage is not reported as an unknown company.
maxConcurrency	integer	5	Capped at 10. Public services; stay polite.
requestTimeoutSecs	integer	30
maxRetries	integer	3	Exponential backoff on 429 and 5xx.
proxyConfiguration	object	off	Only if a registry rate-limits the datacenter IP.

Simplest run:

{ "identifiers": ["1790016919001", "3101005212"] }

Four ways to read the results

The dataset ships with prepared views, so nothing needs flattening by hand:

• Companies — one row per ID with the review columns.
• Flagged only — just the entities an authority warned about.
• Legal representatives — one row per person, ready for screening.
• Branches — one row per establishment.

Export as CSV, Excel, JSON or XML, or pull from the API.

How country detection works

ID length decides the registry: 13 digits is an Ecuadorian RUC, 9 or 11–12 digits is Costa Rican, and a 10-digit ID goes to Costa Rica when it starts with 3 or 5 (cédula jurídica, NITE) and to Ecuador otherwise. The one genuinely ambiguous case — an Ecuadorian foreign-resident cédula starting with 30 — routes to Costa Rica, and any record resolved from an ambiguous shape carries a routingNote telling you so. Prefix the ID with EC: or CR: and the guesswork disappears.

Output notes

• One dataset item per input ID, so a batch of 500 gives 500 rows you can join back on identifier.
• Failures are data, not silence: found: false plus an error of not_found, invalid_identifier, unroutable_identifier or lookup_failed.
• Dates are ISO. registryUpdatedAt shows how fresh the authority's own record is.
• Registry SI/NO values become real booleans; Spanish statuses map to active / suspended / inactive / not_registered, with the original in statusOriginal.

Pricing

Pay per event, and you only pay for what the registry actually returned:

Event	Price	When
Company record	$0.014	Once per tax ID found, including status, activity, legal representatives, risk flags and the head office address
Additional branch	$0.0005	Per registered branch beyond the head office, and only when you ask for establishments
Actor start	$0.0001	Container startup. Not an access fee.

Not-found, invalid and unroutable IDs are free, so a dirty input list costs you nothing extra. There is no minimum spend and no subscription.

A worked example: 500 Ecuadorian and Costa Rican companies, establishments switched off — 500 × $0.014 = $7.00. The same 500 with full branch data, averaging four branches each, adds 1,500 branch rows at $0.0005 = $0.75.

For comparison, the manual alternative is opening a Spanish-language government portal and transcribing fields, one company at a time — two to four minutes each. At 500 companies that is roughly a full working day.

Notes on the sources

Both registries are read through endpoints their authorities serve publicly. This Actor does not authenticate, does not bypass access controls and does not solve captchas. Sole traders are natural persons, so treat their records as personal data under your own GDPR/LOPDP obligations.

Ecuador's tax-debt endpoint is deliberately not used: it sits behind a web application firewall, and working around that would not be appropriate.

Not an official product of either authority. This Actor is an independent tool built by Echocall LLC. It is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or operated by Ecuador's Servicio de Rentas Internas, Costa Rica's Ministerio de Hacienda, or any other government body. Authority names are used descriptively to identify the public data sources.

Roadmap

Same schema, more registries — Panama, Guatemala, Paraguay, Uruguay, and Mexico's Registro Público de Comercio. Adding a country is one adapter module; the output contract does not change, so your integration keeps working.

FAQ

How do I look up Latin American companies in bulk?

Paste a mixed list of tax IDs. The Actor routes each one to the right national registry, queries it, and returns one normalized row per ID — so a 500-line list of Ecuadorian and Costa Rican entities comes back as a single table you can join on identifier.

Which countries are covered?

Ecuador (SRI) and Costa Rica (Ministerio de Hacienda) today. Panama, Guatemala, Paraguay and Uruguay are next; adding a country is one adapter module and the output contract does not change, so your integration keeps working.

Do I have to tell it which country an ID belongs to?

No. ID length and prefix decide the registry. Prefix an ID with EC: or CR: if you want to force one, and any record resolved from a genuinely ambiguous shape carries a routingNote telling you so.

What risk flags does it return?

ghostTaxpayer and nonExistentTransactions from Ecuador, taxDelinquent (moroso) and nonFiler (omiso) from Costa Rica, plus suspended from both. Every record also carries hasRiskFlag and riskFlagsRaised, so a reviewer can sort a 5,000-row export by risk in one click.

Why is a flag null rather than false?

Because the country does not publish it. Costa Rica does not designate ghost taxpayers, and reporting that as "no ghost flag" would be a false clean bill of health.

Is scraping these registries legal?

Both registries are read through endpoints their authorities serve publicly. This Actor does not authenticate, does not bypass access controls and does not solve captchas. Sole traders are natural persons, so treat their records as personal data under your own GDPR/LOPDP obligations.

What does it cost to try?

Every new Apify account includes free monthly usage credit, which covers a few hundred lookups before you pay anything.

Related Actors

Need one country only, with a country-specific schema? Use Ecuador SRI RUC Scraper or Costa Rica Cedula Scraper.