Origin of US$17.11 billion that left Mexico can not be explained

Mexico reported an outflow of US$17.11 billion last year whose origin can not be explained in Mexico's foreign account, the Bank of Mexico (Banxico) said.

According to the item “errors and omissions” in the 2015 balance of payments, these resources were equivalent to 60.3% of the foreign direct investment that entered the country last year (US$28.38 billion dollars) and half of the surplus.

The item “errors and omissions” includes all operations of the Mexican economy with foreign countries whose nature can not be explained by monetary authorities.

In the past five years, the item has averaged an annual outflow of 18 billion dollars.

"This high figure speaks of a poor information quality in the balance of payments; this means that many operations are not properly registered. We should investigate why," said Raúl Feliz, professor and researcher at the Center for Research and Teaching in Economics (CIDE).

Feliz explained that these resources could be related to companies seeking to evade taxes, problems in registering exports and imports or investments that the Bank of Mexico does not report fast enough.

"But such big an error or omission is not justifiable" he added.

Some experts say that illegal proceeds could be part of the explanation.

In 2014 Agustín Carstens, governor of the Bank of Mexico, said to EL UNIVERSAL that “we can not rule out that money of organized crime could be reflected in the item errors and omissions.”