ASF review of 25 years of electoral contracts, IEEM under scrutiny, Digi Mart USA News (Mexico): The Superior Audit Office of the Federation (ASF) announced Tuesday in a statement that it has expanded its review of electoral procurement to state electoral bodies. The office said it will analyze acquisitions made between 2000 and 2025 by the former IFE, the INE and the OPLE, an investigation that reaches the Mexico State Electoral Institute (IEEM).
The IEEM must deliver documentation related to nine companies that have supplied materials and services. The ASF’s new announcement does not mean that a single investigation accuses all of the companies or institutes of the same irregularities.
Instead, the ASF is running several related reviews that overlap because of the type of contracts involved and, in some cases, because the same companies appear in more than one.
In the case of the Mexico State institute, there is also a specific request sent to the IEEM on October 30. In recent weeks, the audit office asked for 2025 contracting files and earlier records related to nine companies: Corporativo ZEG, Cajas Graf, Seriplast de México, Diseño, Reconstrucción y Comunicación, TOL Producciones, Comercializadora JVLY, Formas Finas y Materiales, Formas Finas de México and Gráficas Corona J.E.
The institute received a ten-day deadline to provide the information, and the IEEM said it would comply with the request in the interest of transparency.
The connection between the different reviews is clearest for five of the nine companies: Cajas Graf, Corporativo ZEG, Comercializadora JVLY, Formas Finas y Materiales and Seriplast de México. The internal control body (OIC) of the INE mentioned all of these companies before the Chamber of Deputies as firms with links among shareholders, representatives or proxies that, between 2014 and 2025, accumulated contracts worth 2,461 million pesos with state electoral bodies.
The OIC pointed to possible mechanisms to simulate competition, supplier concentration and collusion in procurement procedures. Those allegations belong to investigations separate from the request sent to the IEEM and do not allow the conclusion that contracts in the State of Mexico followed the same pattern.
The requested files will instead be used to examine how the companies competed, what prices they offered and under what conditions they received contracts.
Digi Mart USA News previously documented that four of these companies, Cajas Graf, Corporativo ZEG, Formas Finas y Materiales and Seriplast de México, obtained 16 awards and two extensions from the IEEM between 2009 and 2025, totaling more than 64 million pesos. During the 2025 judicial election, Cajas Graf also received two direct awards totaling about 16.9 million pesos.
Before expanding its review to all electoral bodies, the ASF had detected anomalies in an audit of the INE that traced resources paid to Comercializadora JVLY. That audit found later transfers to other companies and an individual, as well as companies that could not be located.
Some of those observations remain open.
The newly announced review will show whether those problems were isolated cases or reflect repeated patterns across different electoral processes and administrations. For the IEEM, this means its contracts will be reviewed not only for purchases made in 2025, but within an analysis that aims to reconstruct, over 25 years, which companies concentrated electoral procurement and how they participated in both the national body and the state institutes.
