Arturo Sanchez Jimenez
Newspaper La Jornada
Sunday, August 14, 2022, p. 4
Since 2007, the Superior Audit Office of the Federation (ASF) has detected deficiencies in the operation of the Ministry of Economy (SE) – the agency that grants mining concessions – with respect to the control of the registry of concession titles in the mining sector and of the payment of rights, as well as the lack of sanctions for non-compliance by concessionaires and a marginal coverage of inspection visits.
In the most recent reviews made by the ASF, corresponding to the 2019 and 2020 public accounts, the supervisory body found that the SE – which carries out inspection visits to mining concessions, while the supervision of the working conditions of the mines corresponds to the Ministry of Labor and Social Welfare – carried out 92 annual inspection visits, which means that it only reviewed 0.4 percent of the almost 25,000 concessions that were in force.
In the 2007, 2010, 2012 and 2013 public accounts audit reports, the ASF carried out a series of audits related to the collection of rights on mining concessions and compliance with the obligations of the concessionaires.
Subsequently, in the reviews of the public accounts from 2014 to 2017, the ASF analyzed the collection of rights, their distribution and their application in physical investment projects by the mining states and municipalities.
From 2018 to 2029, it examined the management of mining rights, the regulation and modernization of mining activity and the extinction of the Mining Fund trust.
In these reviews, the ASF observed deficiencies in the integration and control of the technical and statistical reports of verification of works and exploration and exploitation works, as well as the reports on the production, benefit and destination of minerals and accounting; of the initiation of cancellation procedures; verification visits, as well as cancellations and transfers of rights.
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It also detected a lack of sanctions for non-compliance with the obligations of the mining concessionaires and anomalies in the delivery of timely and correct information to the Tax Administration Service so that it could exercise its powers in accordance with the Federal Rights Law.
In addition, it found that the SE lacked information on the mining concessionaires, such as the lack of the RFC, payments from concessionaires that were not in the register, differences in the names of the concessionaires and the company name, among other problems.
The ASF reports indicate that in 2019, the SE spent 118 million pesos to regulate, promote and inspect the concessions in charge of mining exploration, exploitation and use.
However, the SE did not have a diagnosis regarding the regulation of the mining sector, which would allow it to identify the regulatory needs that require priority attention and that would allow it to guide the government’s work, in terms of the issuance of modification proposals, to issue and update the legal instruments that regulate mining.
In relation to the Public Registry of Mining, the supervised entity did not certify in 2019 the update of the registry; system implementation; the acts and contracts that were registered, nor that it was available to society, so the lack of legal transparency could affect the reliability for investment in the mining sector.
From the mining cartography, the dependency had the platform called Cartominmex, which contains information on the location of the mining agencies and mining concessions, among other data; however, it did not credit the efforts to update it.
