It Stayed: The Four Exits for a Temporary Import That Is Not Coming Back

Four of the five outcomes are decisions. The fifth is what happens when the other four go unmade.

Most operators meet this problem as a discovery rather than a plan. A balance in the inventory system that has not moved in two years. A pallet of components for a product line that was discontinued. A machine that was going to go back to the parent company and never did. The goods came in temporarily, and temporarily has quietly become a description of the paperwork rather than the plan.

The instinct at that point is to treat the situation as a compliance failure and go looking for the penalty. That instinct is backwards. Mexican customs law provides four lawful ways out of a temporary import that is not coming back, and each of them is a normal filing with a known cost. There is also a fifth outcome, and it is the only one that is not a choice. It arrives on its own when nobody selects any of the other four, and it is always the most expensive of the five.

This piece is the decision tree: what each exit requires, what it costs, and the moment it stops being available.

The rule that governs all five

Start with the sentence that sits underneath every option. Article 108 of the Ley Aduanera 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.

Two words in that sentence do the work. "Or" is what creates the four exits: returning abroad is one way to comply, and being destined to another customs regime covers the rest. "Within the periods" is what closes them. Every exit below is a way of satisfying Article 108 while the clock is still running. Once it stops, the menu does not shrink to fewer options. It changes into a different menu, with a different price.

You can see this encoded in the catalog of pedimento keys itself. Apéndice 2 of Anexo 22 defines the change-of-regime keys as applying to goods moved to permanent import before the return deadline expires, and defines a separate key, A3, for goods whose term already expired. The appendix draws the line for you. The clave de pedimento you are entitled to file is the clearest signal of which side of the deadline your operation is on.

Exit one: change of regime to permanent import

The goods stay in Mexico and stop being temporary. Legally, this is a change of customs regime, and it is an instrument the law provides rather than an admission that something went wrong.

Article 109 of the Ley Aduanera sets the price for inputs. A company may convert the temporary import into a permanent one provided it pays the countervailing duties in force at the moment of the change, and the general import duty updated in the terms of Article 17-A of the Código Fiscal de la Federación, from the month the goods were imported temporarily until the change is made. Read what is in that formula and what is not. There is updating for inflation. There is no surcharge for late payment, and there is no fine, because nothing is late.

Machinery follows a different arithmetic, and this is where CFOs are most often surprised in a good way. Under Article 110, the general import duty on fixed assets brought in under Article 108, fracción III is paid at the time of the temporary import, not deferred. Those goods may then be changed to permanent import within the applicable periods, paying the contributions that correspond. An operation that has been treating its installed equipment as a large contingent duty liability is sometimes carrying a much smaller one than the input balances sitting next to it. What value gets declared on that change is a separate question with its own rules, and it belongs to its own piece.

When it stops being available. At the return deadline. After that, this is not a change of regime at all. It is a regularization, which is the fifth outcome.

Exit two: transfer to another company with a Program

The goods stay in Mexico, stay temporary, and change hands. This is the exit that fits a corporate restructure, a plant consolidation, or a component that another affiliate can actually consume.

Article 105 sets the boundary: the ownership or use of goods under temporary import cannot be transferred or sold, except among maquiladoras, companies with export programs authorized by the Secretaría de Economía, and foreign trade companies registered with that agency, under the conditions the Reglamento establishes. This is a closed circle. A transfer to an ordinary Mexican buyer is not a transfer, it is a sale, and it requires exit one first.

Article 112 sets the mechanics. The transferor files an export pedimento in its own name, determining and paying the general import duty corresponding to the foreign goods under its tariff classification in the terms of Article 56, at the exchange rate in force on the payment date. The receiving company simultaneously files a temporary import pedimento in its name. If the receiver also files a written statement assuming solidary liability for the general import duty on the goods imported temporarily by the transferor and its suppliers, the duty payment is deferred under Article 63-A. That written assumption is the difference between a transfer that moves cash and one that only moves paper.

One change deserves attention here, because it is new. The reform published in the Diario Oficial de la Federación on November 19, 2025, in force since January 1, 2026, added a paragraph to Article 112: those intervening in the operation must request, provide and keep the information and documentation established in Article 59, fracción V, from the moment the goods were destined to the temporary import regime through their transfer, including all documentation proving the productive process the transferred goods underwent. A transfer is no longer two paired pedimentos and a handshake. It is two paired pedimentos and a file that has to reach back to the original entry.

When it stops being available. When either Program stops being alive, and at the return deadline. If a cancellation procedure has been opened against the transferring company, the benefit of transferring is suspended while the procedure runs.

Exit three: destruction or donation

Some goods have no commercial future in any direction. Returning them costs more than they are worth, and nobody wants to buy them.

Article 109 provides that waste and scrap from temporarily imported goods are not considered definitively imported, provided the scrap is destroyed and the control provisions of the Reglamento are met. Those control provisions are the whole exit. Destruction is not an event you perform and document afterwards. It is a notice filed in advance, at the place, day and hour stated in the notice, with an acta de hechos recording quantity, weight or volume, the destruction process used, and the entry numbers under which the goods came into national territory. The current procedure lives in ficha de trámite 102/LA of Anexo 2 of the Reglas Generales de Comercio Exterior, which is titled for exactly this: notice of destruction of scrap under Article 109 of the Law, for companies with an IMMEX Program.

Donation is the same logic with a recipient. The Reglas provide a procedure under which IMMEX companies may donate scrap and obsolete machinery and equipment to entities authorized to receive donations, filing paired pedimentos covering the return in the donor's name and the permanent import in the donee's name, with a donation letter describing the goods including brand, year, model and serial number where applicable. Apéndice 2 carries a dedicated key for it, V9, which is the tell that the customs system treats this as a defined operation and not as an act of charity with a form attached.

When it stops being available. Destruction only reaches goods that qualify as scrap in the terms of the Ley Aduanera, which is a definition, not a business judgment. And the notice has a lead time. An operation that decides to destroy on the last week of the period has already missed this exit.

Exit four: return abroad in whatever condition it is in

The oldest exit and the least discussed, because it feels like a defeat. The goods leave under the return key for the Program, the balance is discharged in the inventory system, and the file closes.

Two things make this exit better than its reputation. It is the only one that requires no payment of deferred contributions at all when done inside the period. And it is the only one that stays available, in a modified form, after the period has expired.

That modified form is the bridge to the fifth outcome, and its economics are worth stating precisely. Under Article 183 of the Ley Aduanera, when the infraction consisted of exceeding the periods granted for return and the return is made 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. When the omission in returning temporarily imported goods is discovered by the authority instead, the fine is the one set out in Article 178, fracciones I through IV, or a percentage of commercial value where the goods are exempt.

The cap is the whole point. Acting first puts a ceiling on the exposure. Being found first removes it.

The fifth outcome, which nobody selects

Nothing happens on the day the period expires. No notification arrives, no system flags anything, no truck is stopped. That is precisely what makes this outcome so common. The goods are now, in the words of Article 108, understood to be illegally in the country, and the operation carries on exactly as it did the week before.

The lawful path back is regularization, and Apéndice 2 gives it its own key, A3, covering goods that entered under temporary import and whose term expired, along with the scrap they generated. The cost of that path is the sum of everything the earlier exits avoided. The deferred contributions become payable. They are updated under Article 17-A of the Código Fiscal de la Federación, as they would have been under a timely change of regime, and they now also carry the surcharges Article 21 imposes for late payment, which the timely change of regime did not. On top of that sits the fine, capped or uncapped depending on who moved first.

In our work with IMMEX operations across the corridor, the cases that end well have one thing in common, and it is not sophistication. It is that somebody ran the balance report before anybody else did.

Consider two operations with the same problem. Both discover, during an internal review, a two-year-old balance of components that will never be consumed. The first files the regularization on its own initiative, pays the contributions with updating and surcharges, absorbs a fine bounded by the value of the goods, and closes the entry. The second decides to wait for the annual audit cycle to see whether the balance can be reconciled another way. When the authority raises it, the same goods carry a fine calculated on a different scale with no ceiling, and the conversation is no longer about a balance. It is about whether the inventory control system was reliable, which is a question with consequences reaching well beyond one pallet.

Choosing, and what the file has to show afterwards

The decision test is short, and it runs in this order.

1. Is the period still running? If yes, all four exits are open and you are choosing on economics. If no, you are regularizing, and the only remaining question is how fast.
2. Does the merchandise have a future with somebody who holds a live Program? If yes, the transfer is usually the cheapest exit, because the deferral survives it.
3. Does it have a future with you, in Mexico? Then change the regime. Check the machinery separately from the inputs, because the duty may already have been paid at entry.
4. Does it have no commercial future at all? Then it is destruction or donation, and both of them need lead time you have to plan for.
5. Otherwise, return it.

Each exit leaves a different trace, and the trace is what an auditor reads three years later. A change of regime leaves a pedimento under the change-of-regime key and the payment of the updated duty. A transfer leaves paired pedimentos, the written assumption of solidary liability if the deferral was used, and now the documentation of the productive process reaching back to the original entry. A destruction leaves the notice, the acta de hechos and the entry numbers. A donation leaves paired pedimentos and the donation letter. A regularization leaves an A3 and the evidence of what was paid. In every case the inventory system has to show the discharge that matches, on the date it happened, against the entry that brought the goods in.

That is the actual deliverable. Not the decision, which takes an afternoon, but the file that proves the decision was made and executed.

Joffroy has run customs operations at the US and Mexico border for more than 122 years, across 39 ports, and roughly 190,000 operations a year pass through that structure. The temporary imports that become expensive are almost never the ones where somebody chose the wrong exit. They are the ones where the choice was deferred until the choosing stopped being possible.

Four of the five outcomes are decisions. If there is a balance in your system that has not moved in a year, the decision is available today at a price you can calculate. Talk to a Joffroy expert while it still is.

TRADE. UNDER CONTROL.