Daniel Hallivis, Partner of Englobally Mexico and specialist in accounting-tax matters, clarified certain doubts regarding the Fiscal Reform carried out in Mexico recently.
At a general level, what changes made to the Tax Reform should companies in Mexico take into account?
Many changes must be considered since it is a major Fiscal Reform. One of the main intentions is to attack the so-called “factureros”, as they are called here in Mexico, who are the people who sell apocryphal or false invoices. Also, the reform is attacking all employee outsourcing companies. Here in Mexico, it is common to have the payroll of the company under an outsourcing scheme, but today, the authority is putting enough obstacles to do so. For example, they implemented withholding taxes.
On the other hand, this reform also contemplates new companies such as Uber have to pay taxes. Although in Mexico, they have always paid taxes, only now it is being added textually to the law. On the other hand, they added all online companies, such as Netflix and all Amazon-style platforms.
What challenges do you see in the reforms of the 2020 Economic Package?
In Mexico, unfortunately, there was a lot of purchase and sale of invoices, and they did it by having all their payroll (financial records of employee salaries) through these illegal schemes. As a result, all these payroll costs are going to increase. For example, I had a client who previously used to pay five million pesos a month, and now, when we calculated to have a completely legal payroll, it increased to eight million pesos. Also, Mexican authorities published the Official Mexican Standard STPS-035, commonly known as “NOM 35”. The main obligations set out by NOM 35 to companies are to establish a psychosocial risk prevention policy and identify and analyze psychosocial risk factors that directly affect the health of their employees. This forces companies to fill a certain number of questionnaires and formats that must be submitted to the government online. It is a reasonably large administrative procedure for a company and applies to those with more than fifteen employees, that is, for almost all.
How can Englobally Mexico support companies in the process of adapting to this new legality?
We can help in complying with these new regulations and formats, for example, “NOM 035”. Also, we can help the companies that have their payroll through outsourcing, as many procedures must comply with many requirements.
Something fundamental that exists from 2013, which the government began to promote now, is the issue of prevention of money laundering. There are specific activities that the law considers to be conducive for money laundering, such as car sales, real estate, jewelry sales, among others. Currently, the taxpayer must declare monthly about all the activities that he operated during the month, with much information. We do these operations on behalf of the client. It is also necessary that all companies that perform these vulnerable activities have a compliance manual, which is called PLD (Money Laundering Prevention). This compliance manual should be distributed to all company personnel. It is quite extensive and must have integrated a file with all the operations carried out, with all customers, suppliers, among other things. We can also do this job for the companies.