fyi DR consular fees increase in the USA

Tordok

Bronze
Oct 6, 2003
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The Miami consulate thread elsewhere in the forum has reminded me to alert others about new fees. Less than 2 months ago I had to obtain consular legalization of some paperwork. The fee was indeed posted at the time on the DR Consulate in Washington, DC website. The fees were of a whooping US$75 for each notarized document. Since I had no choice, I went ahead and did my stuff.

Last week, I had another batch of documents that needed "legalization" so I went ahead and used the US$75 formula. Well, I received a call from the consulate to let me know that I still owed them >US$300 because the new rate was now US$125 for each document. I told them that I had gone to their website only to double check and their website had been down for some time and no information was publicly available. That prompted a "Why didn't you call us?" Why, indeed would I call when I just did the same thing only a few weeks ago. Well, the Consular fees went up as of July 1, 2006. Apparently the government is milking every possible source of income to help compensate for hard currency losses expected from the CAFTA-DR deal.

I can understand raising them by maybe 10 bucks or even 15 but a full US$50 increase on something that was already ridiculously expensive seems abusive.

And I was just getting a few business related papers processed (over US$1,000 mind you), I can only imagine if someone is trying to get married, adopt a child, or trying to relocate there and need several more documents processed.

Has anyone here heard any complaints related to this dispproportionate price hike?

- Tordok