“Many people ask us if the goose that laid the golden eggs has already run its course, and the answer, fortunately or unfortunately, is no. I say unfortunately, because the numbers continue to show that tax collection is growing due to large taxpayers (…) the auditing of large taxpayers continues to be very profitable,” explained Gari Flores Hernández González, general administrator of the SAT’s Tax Collection Department.
This perspective is because this institution by law has the power to review the previous five years of large companies, which prevents companies or service providers from having plans to pay less taxes and to get up to date with the tax authorities, in addition to the fact that for the collection and negotiations of tax debts, the intermediation of accounting firms between the tax authority and the taxpayers is no longer permitted.
“When there is an intermediary, who made this type of planning, and was the one who sold it and told the client to defend it, it is like talking to a wall because he is not going to tell his client, ‘what do you think? We do owe the SAT’ (…), for us it is very important to have this direct approach with the company and explain to them; ‘hey look, it is not personal, as the head of the SAT, Antonio Martínez, says, we do not see names, we do not see corporate names, we see financial operations, tax planning, and what you did does not apply to the law’. And that is why they end up correcting themselves, that policy was in place at the beginning and is permanent,” explained the SAT official.
The total tax collection goal for the end of 2024 is 5 trillion pesos, and it is expected that this will be 4 billion pesos above the planned amount, explained the general administrator of Revenue.
The supervision of large taxpayers, after conducting reviews and audits, will have an important contribution to total collection. In the first five months of the year, the treasury collected 395,025 million pesos, for this concept, the amount was higher by 261,563 million compared to the same period last year, according to figures from the SAT.
“We have to reach what the income law establishes, which is 5 billion pesos. That is the potential revenue we have for this year. For the next year, we have to close 2024 and from there, see the plans, the annual declarations, what they paid in the provisional returns they submitted, and we begin to run the models. Reaching compliance halfway through this year, which is a transition year, in which there was an election, in which there are elections in the United States, is a feat,” said the SAT official.
Who are the big contributors?
The audit of large taxpayers or large companies, which are those that invoice more than 1.8 billion pesos per year, has focused on 18 specific economic sectors, including the steel, automotive, construction, electronics and financial sectors.
“Although companies prefer voluntary compliance, the SAT is working on their regularization and during this same period, 377 large companies were fully or partially regularized,” the Mexican tax authority said at the end of May.
Among the companies that have paid large tax credits during this six-year period are: Walmart, América Móvil, BBVA México, Grupo Modelo, IBM, FEMSA, Grupo BAL and Grupo Salinas.
It extends to medium and large companies
The strategy of oversight and process improvement to facilitate taxpayer compliance was extended from the beginning of the current administration, with Raquel Buenrosto as head of the SAT, from large companies to small and medium-sized companies, when Antonio Martínez Dagnino went from being general administrator of Large Taxpayers to head of the treasury, in October 2022, says the administrator of Collection at the SAT.
Therefore, the collection of taxes from audits of small and medium-sized taxpayers has also grown considerably. From 2013 to 2018, this amounted to 439,102 million pesos, and rose to 1,042 billion pesos from 2019 to the end of May 2024, an increase of 83.3%, according to figures from the Treasury and presented by President Andrés Manuel López Obrador at his morning press conference.
