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A Program ends on a Tuesday. The presses do not move. Nobody unbolts anything, no truck arrives, no seal is broken. On Wednesday the plant runs the same shift it ran the week before, with the same equipment, in the same building. Every one of those machines is now standing on a permission that no longer exists.
That is the whole problem in one sentence. The machinery did not change. The premise underneath it did.
This piece continues the cluster on fixed assets under IMMEX. The first one set out why the return obligation for machinery has no date attached to it, because its duration is tied to the validity of the Program rather than to a number of months. This one picks up at the moment that validity ends and the date finally arrives.
What ends, and what does not
The Program is an authorization. Under artículo 3 of the Decreto IMMEX, the Secretaría de Economía grants it to a Mexican legal entity to carry out manufacturing operations, and under artículo 12 it stays valid for as long as the holder keeps meeting the requirements it was granted under and the obligations the Decreto imposes. When the Program ends, that authorization ends with it.
What does not end is the customs regime the goods entered under. Nothing in the Decreto converts a temporary import into anything else automatically. The machines remain temporary imports until somebody files a document that changes what they are. Artículo 28 places that obligation squarely on the company: once the Secretaría notifies the cancellation, the company must change the goods to permanent import or return them abroad within sixty calendar days.
This is why the situation is so easy to underestimate from the plant floor. A cancellation produces no physical event. No inspector arrives, no line stops, no machine gets tagged. The absence of an event reads as the absence of a problem, and the sixty days run anyway.
On paper, the difference between a suspension and a cancellation is one line in a notification. In practice it is the difference between an operation that cannot bring in new material and an operation that has sixty days to decide the fate of everything already inside. A suspension of the benefit of importing leaves the Program alive, which means the permanence period for the fixed assets, the validity of the Program itself, is still running. A cancellation ends it, and every machine on the floor inherits a deadline it never had before.
Sixty calendar days, counted from a notification
Artículo 28 of the Decreto IMMEX is short, and it is the load-bearing provision of this entire scenario. When the Secretaría notifies the cancellation of a Program, the company must change to the permanent import regime, or return the goods abroad under the terms of the Ley, within sixty calendar days from the date the cancellation is notified. SAT may authorize, on a single occasion, up to one hundred eighty additional calendar days, subject to the conditions set out in the Reglas Generales de Comercio Exterior.
That obligation is no longer only a Decreto provision. The reform to the Ley Aduanera published in the Diario Oficial de la Federación on November 19, 2025, in force since January 1, 2026, added the same rule to artículo 108: when the cancellation of a Program is notified, the company must change to the permanent import regime or return the goods under the terms of the Ley, within a period not exceeding sixty calendar days from the notification. The practical effect for an operator is unchanged. The legal effect is not. The window now sits in the statute rather than only in the Decreto that grants the Program, alongside the sentence that says what the goods become if it passes.
The notification arrives in three ways, and only one of them looks like a customs matter from inside the company.
The first is the annual report. Under artículo 25, the Program holder files an electronic report to the Secretaría 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.
The second is cancellation for cause. Artículo 27 lists nine grounds, and they range from failing to meet any obligation under the Decreto, to not being locatable at the fiscal domicile or at the addresses registered in the Program, to 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, gives ten business days to offer evidence and arguments, and issues its resolution within three months.
The third is voluntary. Artículo 27 lets companies ask the Secretaría to cancel the Program, or alternatively to temporarily suspend the benefit of importing under it, stating the circumstances behind the request.
Neither provision distinguishes between the three. The window attaches to the notification, not to the reason behind it. A company that requested its own cancellation as part of an orderly wind-down gets exactly the same sixty days as one that lost a procedure it spent three months contesting. The length of the window is never the variable. What varies is how much of it goes to deciding and how much of it went to preparing.
And the days are calendar days. Sixty of them across a December, or across Semana Santa, is materially less working time than the number suggests, on an exercise that requires customs filings, physical logistics and a signed decision per asset.
The exit that closes before the window opens
Read artículo 28 again and count the options it names. There are two: change to permanent import, or return abroad. Transfer to another company with a Program is not on that list, and the added paragraph of artículo 108 names the same two.
That matters because transfer is usually the first idea in the room. A corporate restructure that moves manufacturing to a sister entity looks, from the outside, like a transfer problem. The instinct is to move the machines on paper to the affiliate that still holds a Program and keep the deferral intact.
Artículo 27 closes that door earlier than most operations expect. When the Secretaría opens a cancellation procedure, it orders the suspension of two benefits at the same time: importing the goods authorized in the Program, and transferring those goods to other companies with a Program or to companies registered to operate under it. The suspension starts with the procedure, not with the cancellation. So the sequence a company actually lives through is a procedure of up to three months in which the transfer route is already unavailable, followed by a resolution, followed by sixty days under provisions that never offered transfer in the first place.
The full menu of exits for a temporary import that is not going back, including what each one requires and what each one costs, is the subject of the four exits piece in this cluster. The point here is narrower, and it is about timing. Every one of those exits depends on the Program being alive. The permission underneath the machines is also the permission underneath the options.
Who answers when the company itself is going away
The most common version of this scenario is not enforcement. It is a company winding down for ordinary commercial reasons, with a legal entity heading toward dissolution and an installed asset base nobody has reconciled since installation.
The obligation does not dissolve with the entity. Under artículo 26 of the Código Fiscal de la Federación, liquidators and receivers are solidarily liable for the contributions the company in liquidation or bankruptcy should have paid, as well as those accrued during their management. The same article reaches general directors, general managers and sole administrators for contributions accrued during their tenure, and reaches shareholders, capped at their participation in capital, for the portion of the fiscal interest that the company's own assets cannot cover, when the company falls into the specific situations the article lists.
The Decreto IMMEX adds two mechanisms of its own. Artículo 27, fracción VII makes filing an RFC cancellation notice, or failing to file the annual federal tax returns the company owes, a ground for cancelling the Program. And the article closes by barring companies cancelled under six of its nine grounds, together with the shareholders linked to them who appear in the corporate deed, from obtaining any export promotion program for five years from the date of cancellation. The consequence follows people and future entities, not only the one being wound down.
In group structures the answer moves again. Under artículo 13, a company operating under the controladora modality is directly responsible before the tax and customs authorities for the fiscal credits and the fiscal and customs obligations derived from temporary imports under its Program, and the individual Programs of the controlled companies are cancelled when the controladora Program is authorized. The controlled companies then have to return, change the regime of, or transfer the goods that came in under the individual Program that was cancelled.
The planned exit runs in the other order
Everything above points to a single operating rule. Resolve the inventory, then close the Program. Not the reverse.
The reason is structural rather than tactical. While the Program is alive, every exit is available, the transfer route included, and no clock is running. The moment the Program is cancelled, the menu shrinks to two options and a sixty-day countdown starts on assets that may have been installed for a decade. A company that also wants to stop the inbound flow while it works through the list has an instrument for exactly that in artículo 27, which contemplates requesting a temporary suspension of the benefit of importing rather than a cancellation.
⚠️ Common mistake. Filing the RFC cancellation notice before the customs inventory is resolved. Under artículo 27, fracción VII of the Decreto IMMEX that notice is itself a ground for cancelling the Program, which means the corporate step intended to close the company cleanly is the step that starts the sixty-day countdown on machinery nobody has decided about yet. Sequence the customs file first, then the corporate file.
What a prepared exit looks like, in the order the Decreto rewards:
1️⃣ Reconcile the open entries against what is physically on the floor. Each machine present, matched to the entry that brought it in, with the brand, model or serial number as declared. This is the step that takes the longest when the register was maintained for depreciation rather than for customs, and it is the step that cannot be compressed.
2️⃣ Decide asset by asset between permanent import and return abroad. What value gets declared when a temporarily imported asset finally moves is its own question, with its own rules, and it is the subject of the next piece in this cluster.
3️⃣ Execute the transfers first, while the Program is still alive and the route is still open. A restructure that plans to land machines in a sister IMMEX has to complete that movement before any cancellation procedure begins.
4️⃣ Close the Program, and only then the corporate file.
At Joffroy we run this reconciliation across manufacturing operations on both sides of the border, and the pattern is consistent enough to state plainly: the companies that treat the exit as a customs project with a start date finish inside the window, and the ones that treat it as a corporate project with a customs annex do not.
What the same situation costs when it is found instead of filed
The Ley Aduanera is unambiguous about the endpoint. Artículo 108 provides that goods imported temporarily under a Program must return abroad or be destined to another customs regime within the applicable periods, and that otherwise they are understood to be illegally in the country, because the temporary import regime they were destined to has concluded.
From there the cost splits along one line, and it is not the line most operators expect. Under artículo 183, if the infraction consisted of exceeding the periods granted for return and the return happens spontaneously, the fine runs per fifteen-day period or fraction from the date the period expired until the return is made, and the amount of the fine cannot exceed the value of the goods. If the omission is discovered by the authority instead, the fine is the one set out in artículo 178, fracciones I through IV, or a percentage of commercial value where the goods are exempt. The cap disappears. Spontaneity is not a moral category in this article. It is a ceiling.
Then there is the loop. Artículo 24, fracción V of the Decreto IMMEX obliges the Program holder to return the goods within the applicable periods, and artículo 27, fracción I makes failing to meet any obligation under the Decreto a ground for cancellation. Merchandise that overstays can therefore contribute to cancelling the Program that was holding it, which in turn starts the sixty-day window on everything else still inside. The deferred contributions themselves come due updated and with surcharges under the Código Fiscal de la Federación, and that computation is worked through in the four exits piece.
Nothing in this sequence is exotic. It is the ordinary consequence of a permission ending while the assets it authorized stay where they are.
The list is the whole defense
A Program ends for commercial reasons far more often than for enforcement ones. Consolidation, a plant closure, a restructure, a company that simply stopped exporting enough to justify the compliance load. None of those decisions get made at the trade compliance desk, and none of them arrive labeled as a customs question.
So the discipline is not vigilance. It is inventory. One fixed-asset register that reconciles to the entries, kept current by a named owner, checked once a year against the addresses registered in the Program and against your Anexo 24 module rather than against the depreciation schedule. Sixty calendar days is a workable window for a company that has that list. It is not a workable window for a company that has to build it first.
Joffroy has operated at the US and Mexico border for more than 122 years, across 39 ports, with three Patentes Nacionales in Mexico and a US corporate brokerage license, and roughly 190,000 customs operations a year run through that structure. The IMMEX exits we see go badly are almost never the ones where the law was misread. They are the ones where nobody could say, on the day the notification landed, which entry each machine came in on.
The machines never move on their own. The permission underneath them does. If you are contemplating a restructure, a plant closure or a voluntary cancellation this year, the customs file is the first workstream, not the last one. Talk to a Joffroy expert before the corporate calendar sets the customs calendar for you.
TRADE. UNDER CONTROL.
