Cancún Crackdown: $6M Fines for Operating Without Licenses

Following approximately 4,000 inspections of the city's nearly 56,000 businesses, the Benito Juárez Audit Department has reported that fines totaling around 6 million pesos have been issued. The majority of these fines were given to businesses operating without the required licenses.

The inspections, which are conducted randomly, began after the deadline for renewing operating licenses, which this year was on April 11. The Audit Department typically conducts around 12,000 random inspections annually, meaning that by the start of June, they would have completed about a third of these.

Of the 4,000 businesses inspected, around a thousand were fined. The penalties ranged from 5 to 2,500 Units of Measure and Update (UMA). One notable case involved the company responsible for the parking lot at Plaza Las Americas, which was fined due to operational failures.

The company running the parking lot was found to be operating without a license, as it lacked approval from the General Secretariat of the City Council. This was one of the reasons the company was shut down and fined 60,000 pesos. Despite paying the fine, the parking lot was not allowed to resume operations until it met the conditions set by the City Council and received authorization to restart activities.

The Audit Department clarified that fines are not issued immediately for new businesses. Instead, these businesses are given a grace period of approximately 30 to 45 working days to regularize their operations after being notified to comply with legal procedures.