Puerto Rico Business Law Firm

Casa
Puerto Rico
San Juan
Puerto Rico Business Law Firm

Información de contacto, mapa y direcciones, formulario de contacto, horario de apertura, servicios, puntuaciones, fotos, videos y anuncios de Puerto Rico Business Law Firm, Abogado y bufete de abogados, 151 Calle de San Francisco, San Juan.

Full service law firm that leverages technology to assist clients in the USA facing legal challenges in Puerto Rico, focusing on business, commercial, immigration, bankruptcy, personal injury, contractual, and real estate law.

31/08/2026

Delaware is a default, not a decision, and for a business operating in Puerto Rico it is usually the wrong one.

The reflex is understandable. Every template says Delaware. Every founder guide says Delaware. Institutional investors expect it, and for a venture backed company raising priced rounds from mainland funds, the reflex is often correct.

For everyone else it purchases a second set of obligations. A Delaware entity operating in Puerto Rico still registers here as a foreign entity, still files here, still pays here, and now also files and pays in Delaware with a registered agent invoice attached. Two jurisdictions, two annual filings, two compliance calendars, one business.

It also complicates the thing that actually matters. Act 60 export services decrees attach to a Puerto Rico entity conducting the eligible activity. Layering a mainland parent over that structure raises questions about where contracts sit, which entity earns the income, and whether the arrangement supports the decree at all.

Entity selection should follow the plan for the business. Where do the customers pay. Where will the decree attach. Who will finance it and on what terms. Who signs.

Pick the structure for where the business is going. The default is not an answer.

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29/08/2026

An Act 273 International Financial Entity is a licensed financial institution, and the application reads the way a bank charter application reads.

Capital comes first. The statute and the regulator set minimum capital and require it to be real, funded, and traceable to a documented source. Substance comes next. An IFE maintains a physical office in Puerto Rico with employees on the island, because the license contemplates an operating institution rather than a mailing address.

Then the people. Principals, directors, and controlling owners go through a fit and proper review covering background, financial history, and regulatory record. Then the program. A written compliance and anti money laundering framework, a designated officer, monitoring procedures, and independent testing, submitted as part of the application and examined afterward.

What the license buys is a regulated United States platform serving clients abroad, operating under a decree with a fixed preferential rate for a defined term. For lending, asset management, custody, escrow, factoring, and trade finance businesses currently running through offshore vehicles, that is a materially different position with correspondent banks and institutional counterparties.

Swipe through the requirements that shape an IFE application.

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28/08/2026

An approved Act 60 decree is a contract with continuing obligations, and the annual report is where those obligations either get met or quietly lapse.

Decree holders carry recurring duties for the life of the grant. Annual reports filed with the agency. Annual filing fees. Employment requirements where the decree imposes them. Charitable contribution obligations where they apply. Continued bona fide residency for individual grants. Compliance with any condition written into the grant itself, which varies decree to decree and is the reason nobody should rely on what a friend was told.

Falling out of compliance is not a filing inconvenience. Benefits can be revoked, and revocation can reach backward, converting years of favorable treatment into an assessment with interest attached. The lapse is usually administrative rather than deliberate, which is exactly what makes it common.

Decree holders who stay clean treat the grant as an operating document. The conditions get read once a year against actual practice, the calendar carries every deadline, and the file holds proof that each obligation was satisfied.

Anyone holding a decree who has not reviewed its conditions against current operations in the last twelve months should schedule that review.

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26/08/2026

The moment a crypto business holds someone else assets or moves value on their behalf, it stops being a technology company in the eyes of a regulator.

Custody and transfer are the activities that pull a digital asset business into money transmission territory. That analysis runs at the federal level through registration and program obligations, and at the state and territory level through licensing regimes that differ by jurisdiction and by customer location. A platform serving users across many states is answering to many regulators at once, regardless of where the company sits.

Puerto Rico does not exempt a business from any of it. What Puerto Rico offers is a tax structure and, for the right model, an Act 273 International Financial Entity license that puts the activity inside a regulated institution rather than outside one.

The practical sequence matters. Determine what the product actually does with customer assets. Map the licensing exposure that follows from that. Build the compliance program before launch. Then structure for tax around a business that can lawfully operate.

Founders who reverse that order end up rebuilding the company under pressure, usually after a bank exit or a regulator letter.

Anyone building custody, exchange, or payment functionality should map the licensing question before writing the term sheet.

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25/08/2026

Export services decrees are approved or denied on a short list of structural questions, and every one of them is answerable before you spend money on the application.

Where the clients sit determines whether the revenue qualifies at all. Which entity signs the contracts determines where the income lands. Where the work is actually performed determines whether the service is exported from Puerto Rico or merely billed from it. Whether the business can meet the employment and operational conditions attached to the grant determines whether the decree survives its first annual report.

The applications that fail usually fail because the business was built first and the decree was requested afterward, leaving contracts, payroll, and customer mix pointing in directions the statute does not reward. The applications that succeed were designed against the requirements from the start.

Puerto Rico export services benefits remain one of the strongest incentives available to a service business anywhere under United States law. The qualification work is the price of admission.

Swipe through the questions that decide it.

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23/08/2026

The Act 60 individual decree is narrower than most people describe it, and knowing where the edges are is the difference between a plan and a surprise.

The grant covers qualifying passive and investment income of a bona fide resident, principally interest, dividends, and capital gains attributable to the period after residency is established. That is the core of the benefit and it is substantial for the right holder.

What it does not do is convert earned income. Compensation for services you personally perform is not passive income, and a consultant who moves and keeps invoicing clients has not solved the problem with an individual decree. That income belongs to a business analysis, which usually means an export services decree and an entity built to hold the contracts.

It also does not reach appreciation that accrued before residency, does not cover income sourced to activity outside Puerto Rico, and does not survive a failure to maintain bona fide residency in any year of the decree term.

Most Act 60 plans that work use both tracks deliberately, an individual decree for the portfolio and a business structure for the operating income, each documented on its own terms.

Anyone told a single filing handles everything should ask which income it actually reaches.

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21/08/2026

Shipping goods through Puerto Rico does not dodge a tariff. Manufacturing in Puerto Rico does something better.

Start with the correction, because the internet has this backwards. Puerto Rico sits inside the United States customs territory. Foreign goods arriving at San Juan pay the same duties they would pay arriving at Newark. There is no routing trick, and anyone selling one is selling a penalty.

Now the part that matters. Goods produced in Puerto Rico are United States goods. They move to the mainland as domestic commerce, no customs entry, no duty, no tariff exposure, no country of origin argument. Add a Foreign Trade Zone system, the largest noncontiguous one under United States jurisdiction, where duties and excise taxes on imported inputs are deferred, reduced, or eliminated depending on what the finished product does next.

Then add Act 60 manufacturing and export incentives, a bilingual workforce, and decades of pharmaceutical and medical device production infrastructure already standing.

Companies spent the last several years discovering what tariff exposure costs a supply chain. The response was nearshoring, which still crosses a border. Puerto Rico does not.

For a manufacturer weighing where to place United States production capacity, the island belongs on the short list.

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20/08/2026

Not every dollar a crypto portfolio produces is a capital gain, and the Act 60 individual decree does not treat them all the same way.

Staking rewards, mining proceeds, lending yield, liquidity provision returns, airdrops, and validator income each carry their own character for tax purposes. Some of it looks like ordinary income at receipt. Some of it looks like business income generated by an operation. Some of it produces a basis that matters later when the underlying asset is sold. The individual decree reaches qualifying investment income of a bona fide resident, which is a narrower category than the total number at the bottom of a portfolio dashboard.

Operations complicate it further. A mining business with hardware, power contracts, and employees is a business, and the analysis moves toward entity structure and the export services decree rather than the individual grant. Validator infrastructure serving clients elsewhere raises the same question.

Puerto Rico crypto planning works when each income stream is characterized before the structure is built, and when the structure reflects the characterization rather than the other way around.

Anyone whose crypto income comes from activity rather than appreciation should have that analysis done in writing.

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18/08/2026

Act 60 applications get denied and decrees get revoked for reasons that repeat with unsettling regularity.

The first is treating residency as a formality. A decree does not create residency. Bona fide residency is a factual condition the applicant has to establish and maintain, and the evidence has to exist contemporaneously.

The second is timing revenue against the filing date. Income earned before a decree takes effect is taxed under the rules in place when it was earned. Founders who close a large transaction and then apply have already resolved the question against themselves.

The third is signature by the wrong entity. Contracts signed by the mainland company assign income to the mainland company regardless of where the work happened or where the owner sleeps.

The fourth is treating approval as an ending. Decrees carry annual reports, annual fees, and in many cases employment or contribution obligations that continue for the life of the grant, with retroactive exposure when they lapse.

The fifth is proceeding without confirming how the current program treats effective dates and partial year residency, which is exactly the point where general advice stops being useful.

Swipe through the ones that cost the most.

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17/08/2026

The Puerto Rico incentive almost nobody outside the industry talks about is the one that licenses an actual financial institution.

Act 273 authorizes International Financial Entities, licensed Puerto Rico institutions that serve clients outside Puerto Rico. The permitted activity list is broad: lending, asset management, custody, escrow, factoring, letters of credit, trade finance, correspondent services, and related financial business, operated under a decree with a fixed preferential rate and exemptions that run for a defined term.

The license is not a formality. Applicants face minimum capital requirements, a physical office and staff on the island, a fit and proper review of the principals, an approved compliance and anti money laundering program, and ongoing supervision by the Office of the Commissioner of Financial Institutions. Regulators evaluate the operating plan behind the entity as closely as the paperwork in front of it.

For the right business, the license does something an export services decree cannot. It makes the entity a regulated financial institution operating from United States soil, which changes what counterparties, correspondent banks, and institutional clients are willing to do with it.

Firms running lending, treasury, asset management, or trade finance from outside the United States should look at what an Act 273 platform would replace.

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