A few days ago, the Tax Administration Service (SAT) and the Association of Banks of Mexico (ABM) announced an agreement with which they will begin issuing instant invoices to people making payments by credit or debit card.

Margarita Ríos-Farjat, head of the SAT and Luis Niño de Rivera, president of the ABM, indicate that the objective of this is to ease taxpayers the generation of invoices.

"Soon the payment and billing process will be integrated in the point of sale terminals, the cards will have the taxpayer's tax information and the invoice will be generated," they said at a press conference.

However, Hamlet González, an expert of this area from Central FM Equilibrio radio station, added that another objective of this agreement is to have an exhaustive control over the operations carried out by credit and debit cards.

Hence, the SAT will be able to detect “fiscal discrepancies”, which is when you make more purchases with your credit card compared to the income that you have declared before them.

But what happens when a Mexican has an international credit card issued in another country? The sale terminal will not be able to issue the instant invoice, since the RFC linked to the card chip will not appear.

According to Hamlet, if in some cases there is a higher expense compared to the income received, the SAT may charge that individual.

Hamlet is not the only one who thinks this. Silvino Vergara Nava, an expert lawyer asked citizens to be careful with the use of credit cards, before this recent announcement, since the SAT actually seeks to see if there are more expenses than income declared to conclude that the difference is the cause of Income Tax, so you must pay the tax.

The generation of instant invoices will start during the first four months of 2020 and will be voluntary in a first stage, where each taxpayer can decide whether to generate an invoice at the time of payment. However, even if no invoice is requested, all card-generated transactions are sent to the SAT, said Luis Niño de Rivera.

The SAT says that they currently have information on taxpayer accounts and that this measure only seeks to ease the issuance of card invoices, although it seems that many experts in the field differ.

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