The money laundering and terrorist financing It is a problem not only in Mexico, but worldwide. “The bank is essential so that this does not happen,” said the UP professor
In the last three decades, Mexico has made progress in terms of prevention of operations with resources of illicit origin and financing of terrorism, complying with organizations such as the Financial Action Task Force (FATF) and other international and local regulations to have more and better tools to detect and prevent this type of crime, he explained to Guillermo Ruiz, President of the Commission for the Prevention of Money Laundering of the College of Public Accountants of Mexico (CCPM).
It is not a crime to operate in tax havens
It is important to clarify that having accounts or operating from one of the low-tax countries it’s not illegalHowever, when resources are obtained illegally or used for the purpose of defrauding the treasury, the story changes.
“It is not a crime for any of the operations of a client or user of a financial institution to be related to a jurisdiction classified as ‘tax haven’However, they can be part of the scheme of the commission of a crime when the resources were obtained illegally, or when their payment in these accounts has the purpose of the crime classified as tax fraud ”, stated the National Banking Commission and de Valores (CNBV) to Expansión via email.
Expansión also sought out the Mexican Banking Association, but did not get a response until press time.
The calls Business offshore, that is, those that concentrate resources to obtain tax benefits, for example in countries such as Switzerland or Singapore they are not doing any illegal activityare promoting the use of resource concentration for certain purposes for high-income clients in the world, detailed Rigoberto Borrego, from the UP.
The fact that a name appears in the Pandora papers it does not mean that a crime has been committed, the interviewees agreed.
The bench
The law does not oblige banks to investigate their clients, however, their obligations include: identify and know them, monitor operations performed, detect risk operations and, in case of detecting something unusual, send reports to authorities such as the SAT and the FIU, explained the president of the CCPM’s money laundering prevention commission.
As long as the corresponding payment of taxes is made and reported to the Mexican authority, there is no crime to prosecute. But, “when you start to structure in such a way so that resources go abroad, you have already started generating things that should not happen and you are evading controls and tax avoidance,” added the specialist.
Tax evasion is the omission of paying tax obligations, avoidance is when an illegal strategy is created to avoid paying taxes. “When you evade, you can still save, when you already avoid a crime, preceding money laundering,” Guillermo Ruiz explained.
He added that when it is identified that the operations that its clients intend to carry out involve countries or jurisdictions that Mexican law considers apply preferential tax regimes they are obliged to analyze said operations in order to determine if they should be classified as unusual and, if so, report them to the authority.
Tax payment
Mexico and the world have also applied measures to prevent double taxation regardless of the fact that in a country the tax burden is lower.
The United States and Mexico exchanged information on Mexicans with accounts in the United States and vice versa, through the Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act (FATCA, for its acronym in English); then other countries joined.
Once taxes are paid in a low-tax nation and returned to the country, the corresponding payment is credited to avoid problems. The corresponding declaration is made once the capital returned to Mexico.
“There should be no double taxation, as long as you act within the framework of the law, and declare the resources that are to your man,” said Ruiz.
“The problem is that they do it through offshore companies because the real objective of these people is to earn more, that they are not taking taxes from you. Nobody likes to pay taxes, but they found fictitious companies. The amount of money that many people abroad have is immoral. If they were here, the government would earn a lot more money, “he added.