Loan after loan that is never repaid: how the SAT reads it, what presumptions it triggers, and what the recipient must watch

"It's a loan" is Mexico's favorite explanation for every awkward deposit — and the SAT knows it. That is why the loan is one of the structures with the most presumptions stacked against it in the system: someone who receives borrowed money again and again, never repaying, without a serious contract and without interest, does not have loans in the authority's eyes: they have disguised income waiting to be recharacterized. Here is how it looks from the other side of the desk, and the exact file that separates a legitimate loan from a problem.

The four hostile readings

1. Presumed income for not reporting (art. 90 LISR). An individual must report in the annual return the loans (together with gifts and prizes) that in the year exceed MXN $600,000 individually or in aggregate. The penalty for omitting it is not a fine: it is that the law treats them as accruable income — a real but unreported loan becomes taxable income through pure formal omission. It is the cheapest trap to avoid and the one most people step on.

2. Tax discrepancy (art. 91). If your outlays and deposits exceed your declared income, the SAT presumes income for the difference — and "they were loans" only works with the complete file: without a contract with fecha cierta (a legally certain date), without bank traceability and without a lender with demonstrable financial capacity, the explanation dies at the hearing.

3. The deemed dividend (art. 140-II). If the one lending to you is your own company, the law presumes a dividend — with its ISR — unless the loan meets all its conditions together: deriving from normal operations, being agreed for a term of less than one year, with interest no lower than the late-payment surcharge rate, and being complied with on its terms. The shareholder who lives off perpetual "loans" from his company is accumulating undeclared deemed dividends year after year — one of the most frequent and costly findings in audits of business owners.

4. The anti-money-laundering reading. On the side of whoever lends habitually: the loan is a vulnerable activity with identification and reports. And on both sides: recurring flows with no economic logic are exactly the pattern banks report as unusual — the eternal "loan" is visible to the full triangle, not just to the SAT.

The file that turns a loan into a loan

Five pieces, all of them: a loan (mutuo) contract with fecha cierta (amount, term, interest, collateral where applicable — ratified when signed, not when the letter arrives); real, market-rate interest (referenced to TIIE/CETES + a margin: an interest-free loan between non-relatives is a flag, and between related parties, a transfer-pricing problem); bank flow in both directions — the disbursement AND the payments: a loan that never records a single amortization is the operational definition of simulation; the lender's financial capacity (his own declared income must be able to explain what was lent — the loan from an insolvent relative incriminates both); and the recipient's timely informative filing. With all five, the structure is safe — the loan is a perfectly legitimate contract. With a contract but without payments or interest: defensible, uphill, and it worsens with every year the balance only grows. Without a file, or with loans that are "forgiven" informally: red zone — recharacterization as income or a gift (with its own tax outside the exempt cases), plus the discrepancy chapter.