Fixed Assets Under IMMEX: The Return Obligation Nobody Diarizes

On the floor of a plant in the Bajío there is a press that arrived in 2017. It has been bolted to the same slab ever since. Finance has depreciated it to a residual value. Maintenance has rebuilt the hydraulics twice. Nobody has thought about it in years, which is exactly the point.

In the accounting ledger, that press is an owned asset approaching the end of its useful life. In the customs file, it is a temporary import that is still open. Those two readings of the same machine have been drifting apart since the day it crossed, and nothing in the ordinary run of the operation will bring them back together.

This is the first piece in a cluster on fixed assets under IMMEX. It sets out what the obligation actually is, what its duration attaches to, and why an operation can run cleanly for a decade and still be carrying an exposure nobody has written down.

Two definitions of the same machine

Accounting defines a fixed asset by what the company does with it: capitalize it, assign a useful life, depreciate it on a schedule. Customs defines it by what it is and what it is for.

Under artículo 4, fracción III of the Decreto IMMEX, the fixed-asset category covers machinery, equipment, tools, instruments, molds and spare parts intended for the production process. It also covers equipment for pollution control, research and training, industrial safety, telecommunications and computing, laboratory, measurement, product testing and quality control, and equipment involved in handling materials tied to the export goods. And it covers equipment for administrative development. Anexo 24 of the Reglas Generales de Comercio Exterior anchors the same category to artículo 108, tercer párrafo, fracción III of the Ley Aduanera.

Read the two definitions side by side and the divergence is structural, not clerical. Accounting measures the life of the asset. Customs does not measure the life of anything. It measures how long the goods may stay under the regime they entered through. A press depreciated to zero is still, in customs terms, foreign goods that were admitted temporarily on a premise that has to keep holding.

What the duration is actually tied to

The Decreto IMMEX sets three permanence periods, and the third one is unlike the other two.

Inputs get up to eighteen months. That covers fuels, lubricants and other materials consumed in the production process, raw materials, parts and components that will be fully integrated into export goods, packaging, and labels and brochures. Containers and trailer boxes get up to two years. Fixed assets get the validity of the Program.

That is the whole answer, and it is why the obligation never lands on a calendar. There is no date. Artículo 12 of the same Decreto states that Programs remain valid for as long as the holder keeps meeting the requirements under which the Program was granted and the obligations the Decreto imposes. So the permanence period for a machine is not a number of months. It is a condition.

Two obligations sit alongside it. Artículo 24 requires the Program holder to return the goods within the periods that correspond under the Ley or the Decreto, and to keep the temporarily imported goods at the addresses registered in the Program. The second one is worth sitting with: the machine is not only obligated to leave eventually, it is obligated to be findable in the meantime, at an address the authority holds on file.

So the honest statement of the rule is this. While the Program is alive, the press is exactly where it should be, under a regime that has not expired, with no filing pending. The day the Program stops being alive, the return obligation stops being theoretical and becomes a deadline. The date was never absent. It was contingent.

Why it never surfaces

Inputs manage their own visibility. They get consumed, and consumption is what forces the file to move.

Under Anexo 24, the automated inventory control system has to relate the quantity of finished product to the real consumption of components for a given period, and then discharge those quantities against the entries that covered the temporary import, using first-in first-out, oldest entry first. The minimum reports the system must produce include a balance report showing the balances by tariff classification of the material imported temporarily. A balance that stops moving is a question somebody eventually asks.

Fixed assets sit in a different part of the same system, and they behave differently in it. Anexo 24 requires a dedicated fixed-asset module carrying the customs information for imports, exports, returns, transfers, donations, destructions and changes of regime of the fixed assets, with at least a description including brand and model for machinery and equipment, the entry number, its date and its clave. For companies running the SECIIT under the certification scheme, there is also a fixed-asset catalog identifying each asset, with purchase order, description, brand, model or serial number, and tariff classification.

Now look at what discharges a fixed asset. In the SECIIT discharge process, the system carries out the discharge of temporarily imported fixed assets at the moment of their return, transfer, change of regime or donation. That is a list of exit events. The standard system does not carry a fixed-asset discharge process at all. Nothing on that list happens by itself. There is no consumption to record, no balance that erodes, and no minimum report of fixed-asset balances that would put the press in front of somebody once a quarter.

In our work with IMMEX operations across the corridor, the pattern is consistent: the material side of the inventory file gets reconciled on a monthly rhythm because the production cycle forces it, and the fixed-asset side gets reconciled when a specific person asks a specific question, usually because an audit or a corporate event made them ask it.

Where the clock actually starts

If the deadline is created by an event, then the discipline is knowing which events create it. Four are worth tracking, and only one of them looks like a customs matter.

The first is the annual report. Under artículo 25 of the Decreto IMMEX, the Program holder must file an electronic annual report to the Secretaría de Economía on total sales and exports for the prior fiscal year, no later than the last business day of May. Miss it, and the benefit of importing temporarily is suspended until the omission is cured. If it is still unfiled by the last business day of August, the Program is definitively cancelled as of September 1 of that year. The Secretaría publishes the suspended Programs in June and the cancelled ones in September. This is the only fixed date on the whole map, and it is administrative.

The second is voluntary cancellation. Companies may ask the Secretaría to cancel the Program, or to temporarily suspend the benefit of importing under it. Consolidation, a plant closure, a restructuring that moves manufacturing to a sister entity: these get decided as corporate matters and executed as customs events.

The third is cancellation for cause. Artículo 27 lists the grounds, and they include failing to meet any obligation under the Decreto, lacking the documentation that supports the foreign trade operations, not being located at the fiscal domicile or at the addresses registered in the Program, and, pointedly, the temporarily imported goods not being found at the addresses registered with SAT. The procedure has its own timing: the Secretaría opens it within ten business days of learning the ground exists, notifies the holder, orders the suspension of the benefit of importing and transferring while it runs, gives the holder ten business days to offer evidence and arguments, and issues its resolution within three months.

The fourth is the quiet one. Corporate housekeeping that breaks a Program requirement. Artículo 24 requires registering a change in the addresses where the Program operates at least three business days before the goods are moved to the new address, and notifying the Secretaría of changes of partners, shareholders or legal representative. A plant relocation planned by operations and a share transfer closed by legal both touch the Program, and neither of them arrives at the trade compliance desk labeled as a customs question.

When the event lands, the number is sixty. Artículo 28 of the Decreto IMMEX gives the company sixty calendar days from the date the cancellation is notified to switch the temporarily imported goods to a permanent import or return them abroad. SAT may authorize, on a single occasion, an extension of up to one hundred eighty calendar days, subject to the conditions set in the RGCE.

Sixty calendar days is a comfortable window for a file that is current. It is a brutal one for a file that is not. Consider what the exercise requires for an installed asset base: identifying every open entry, matching each machine physically present to the entry that brought it in, confirming the brand, model or serial number against what was declared, deciding asset by asset between returning it abroad and converting it to a permanent import, and then executing whichever of the two was chosen. An operation that has to reconstruct the first three steps before it can start the fourth has spent half its window on archaeology.

We have seen a plant lose its Program on the annual report, discover it in a DOF publication, and open the sixty-day window with roughly forty machines on the floor and an asset list that had been maintained for depreciation rather than for customs. The machines were all legitimately there. Proving which entry each one came in on took most of the time the company had to decide anything.

The one control that prevents all of it

There is a single control here, and it is unglamorous. Maintain one fixed-asset register that reconciles to both readings of the machine.

Four fields per asset do most of the work, and each of them already exists somewhere in the operation: the entry number and its date, the clave de pedimento it was filed under, the brand, model or serial number as declared, and the registered address where the machine physically sits today. Reconcile that register against the accounting fixed-asset ledger and against the addresses currently registered in the Program once a year. Assign it to a named owner. A register nobody owns is a spreadsheet.

Then put one date in the calendar of the person who owns that register, and make it the last business day of May. Not because the annual report is a customs filing, but because it is the single scheduled event that can end the validity your machines are standing on.

The press in the Bajío is not a compliance problem today. It becomes one in the sixty days that follow an event nobody on the plant floor will see coming, and the only thing that determines how those sixty days go is whether somebody kept the list.

. . .

When was the last time your fixed-asset register was reconciled against your Anexo 24 module, rather than against the depreciation schedule?

TRADE. UNDER CONTROL.