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On June 1, 2026, the Secretaría de Hacienda y Crédito Público (SHCP, Mexico's treasury ministry) announced that the Unidad de Inteligencia Financiera (UIF — Mexico's financial-intelligence unit) and the Agencia Nacional de Aduanas de México (ANAM — Mexico's national customs agency) had signed an inter-institutional cooperation agreement to strengthen information sharing and coordination in the fight against illicit activity tied to foreign trade (SHCP, Comunicado No. 49).
The agreement imposes no new obligation on the importer who complies with the law. It is an instrument between authorities, not a new regulation for private parties. But for any company that moves goods across Mexico's borders, it changes one thing that matters: the authority that watches the flow of money and the authority that watches the flow of goods will now read their records together.
What the agreement establishes
The official statement is short, but each provision carries an operational consequence.
The UIF will be able to share with ANAM “intelligence products built from reports and notices filed by financial entities and by those who perform actividades vulnerables” (vulnerable activities — the legal category of non-financial businesses with anti-money-laundering reporting duties). In other words: the financial system's view of a company's money movements can now flow directly to the customs authority.
In return, ANAM will be able to provide the UIF with “information related to foreign-trade operations, cross-border cash movements, and other elements.” That is, the customs authority's view of a company's goods and commercial operations can now flow the other way.
The agreement also contemplates training, technical assistance, and specialized working groups, with secure exchange mechanisms and data-protection guarantees. It is further framed as part of Mexico's commitment to the standards of the Grupo de Acción Financiera Internacional (GAFI — the Financial Action Task Force).
Read literally, the agreement connects two of the largest pools of information the Mexican state holds on a company with cross-border operations — the financial pool and the customs pool — and commits both authorities to analyze them in a coordinated, ongoing way.
What it means: three records that used to live apart
Map these provisions onto the operational reality of an importer, and three kinds of records that were historically reviewed independently now become part of a single picture.
1. Declared customs value vs. the actual payment for the transaction
Undervaluation and overvaluation have always been customs risks. What changes now is that the financial mirror of a transaction can become a direct validation input for the customs authority, rather than sitting in a separate file.
This risk is not new in regulatory terms. Article 59, section III of the Ley Aduanera (Mexico's Customs Law) and its counterpart Article 81 of the Reglamento de la Ley Aduanera (the Customs Law's regulations) already require importers to keep the manifestación de valor (value declaration, today filed electronically as the MVE) together with “the information, documentation, and other evidence necessary to prove that the declared value was determined in accordance with the applicable legal provisions.” What the UIF–ANAM agreement changes is not the obligation itself, but the authority's ability to cross-check it directly against the financial record of the operation.
2. Cross-border cash movements vs. related financial activity
The statement explicitly names cross-border cash movements. For any operation that involves moving money across the border — its own, a supplier's, or a customer's — the corresponding declaration stops being an isolated formality and becomes part of a broader analysis.
Another foundation that is frequently underestimated in day-to-day operations converges here: Article 17, section XIV of the Ley Federal para la Prevención e Identificación de Operaciones con Recursos de Procedencia Ilícita (LFPIORPI — Mexico's federal anti-money-laundering law) classifies foreign trade as a vulnerable activity when operations exceed the established thresholds, triggering obligations to identify the counterparty and file notices with the UIF. Those notices are precisely the kind of “intelligence products” the UIF can now share with ANAM. For the importer, this means that the information their financial intermediary has already been reporting can have direct consequences for the risk profile through which the customs authority analyzes their operations.
3. A counterparty's commercial activity vs. its financial risk profile
A supplier or customer that has generated alerts within the financial-intelligence systems now sits much closer to those alerts within the customs authority's view than it did before June 1.
On paper, this is an instrument to combat illicit activity, aimed at high-risk actors. In practice, for compliant companies, its effect is more specific: it raises the level of detail at which perfectly legitimate records are observed.
The compliant company is not the target. But its records will have to survive a review in which financial information and customs information are analyzed together — something many organizations never designed their internal processes to do.
Why this is a Trade Director's issue
The natural reaction is to assume that an agreement tied to anti-money-laundering belongs to the legal or compliance desk. That is precisely where the exposure tends to hide.
The records that can now be cross-referenced are commercial records: declared value, tariff classification, origin, counterparties, and the financial movements associated with each operation. They are data built pedimento by pedimento (declaration by declaration).
In our experience analyzing more than 190,000 customs operations a year across more than 39 ports of entry and exit on both sides of the border, regulatory changes tend to favor the companies whose records already tell a coherent, consistent story — and to expose those whose commercial reality and customs narrative were never fully reconciled.
A divergence between a declared value and a payment record may have a perfectly legitimate explanation. But it is now a divergence that can be observed, and the burden of explaining it rests with the importer.
What to do: reconcile before you're asked
The agreement is already in force. The practical response is to read your own records the same way both authorities now can.
Select a representative sample of recent pedimentos and compare the declared value against the actual payment record. The goal is not to find irregularities, but to identify divergences you cannot immediately explain — and to document their legitimate justification today, while the context is still clear. Remember that section V of Article 59 of the Ley Aduanera, in its reformed text in force since January 1, 2026, together with Regla 3.1.42 of the Reglas Generales de Comercio Exterior (RGCE — Mexico's general foreign-trade rules, published in the DOF on December 27, 2025), requires that the electronic file include not only the pedimento and its annexes, but also the payment receipts, contracts, and other elements that prove the resources used in each operation. The documentary standard is already in the law; the UIF–ANAM agreement simply gives it a second audience.
Verify that any cross-border cash movement was declared correctly and is consistent with the related financial activity. It is precisely one of the elements ANAM can now share with the UIF, and one of the elements most frequently treated as a simple administrative requirement.
Conduct due diligence on your counterparties. No company can know whether another carries alerts within the UIF, but the list of taxpayers with presumed nonexistent operations under Article 69-B of the Código Fiscal de la Federación (CFF — Mexico's federal tax code) is an official source worth monitoring.
Finally, turn documentary reconciliation into a standing practice rather than an emergency response.
That level of cross-record readiness is the kind of review a Joffroy expert can assess against your company's operational reality — before both authorities analyze your files as a single body of information.
The bottom line
The statement consists of barely four paragraphs of institutional language about coordination between authorities.
Its operational translation can be reduced to a single sentence: from now on, your customs file and your financial file will be analyzed together.
For the importer whose records already tell the same true story, this is not a significant change.
For the importer who never had to prove that the two agree, the moment to do so is now — on your own schedule, not on the schedule of an official notice.
TRADE. UNDER CONTROL.
Santiago Obeso Rodríguez — Head of Legal & Compliance, Joffroy Global
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