Who publishes this, and how we source it

Editorial mission

Panama Expat Finance publishes practical, verified guides on banking, residency, taxes, and insurance for foreigners moving to or living in Panama. We write for people making real decisions with real money and real deadlines — not for search engines.

How we source our guides

When a guide covers a regulated process, we read the primary source ourselves and cite it directly, by article number where one applies: the Código Fiscal and DGI (Dirección General de Ingresos) rulings for taxes; Gaceta Oficial decrees and SNM (Servicio Nacional de Migración) regulations for residency routes; the Texto Único de la Ley Bancaria, Ley 23 of 2015, and the SBP's own account rules for banking; and Ley 12 of 2012 plus the SSRP's public register for insurance. Each of those articles names the specific law, article, or decree it relies on, and where we can verify a fact against the regulator's own register — a licence class, an authorised insurer — we do that rather than repeat what another site already summarized.

That standard used to sit unevenly across the site. Our banking and insurance guides were, for a while, written closer to practical process — what actually happens at a bank counter or an insurance desk — without naming the statute behind it as explicitly as our tax and residency guides did. That gap is closed: every guide now names its governing law or decree in its sourcing note, visible at the top of the article.

We still describe practical process where it matters — what a compliance officer actually asks for, not what a bank's marketing page claims — but we no longer treat "practical" and "cited" as opposites. A guide can, and should, be both.

Corrections policy

Regulations and bank policies change. If you find something in a guide that's out of date or wrong, tell us and we'll verify it and correct the article. To help you tell us something useful,the contact page lists what to include: which guide, which claim, and where you found the current rule.

Every guide carries a "Last reviewed" date and names its primary source directly below the headline, so you can see for yourself when it was last checked and what it was checked against — not just take our word for either.