Dogmatix

Not being able to offset capital losses against gains is going to be real killer and is really unfair. Thai companies are allowed to do it and carry losses over. There are hardly any domestic assets that you have to file capital gains for, so it is not an issue for domestic investors. Examples would be shares in unlisted companies, bonds, precious metals and collectables but most Thais don't trade these or don't declare them. So it the lack of offset is not an issue enough for people to complain about it. It won't apply to wealthy Thais as they will use offshore corporate structures and only pay Thai tax on dividends as their offshore companies are not Thai tax residents.

I suspect that office will still review your tax return. I file online in Bangkok and it is reviewed by the tax office up the road from my house. They have never asked to see me for PIT but just send a list of documents they want me to send them. They have only requested docs to do with income or deductions, never personal documents though. If you have an online account they probably assume that personal docs were uploaded to open the account.

Bit of a snaffu a farang dropping a firearm in front of a night club. Hardly likely to able say. Whoops. Sorry guys. I do have a carry permit. Here it is. Why does Thailand issue visas to people with lengthy criminal records or are they all overstayers on transit visas? They talk about wanting to get rid of foreign mafia types but seem happy to issue them more than tourist and transit visas in many cases. Why not insist on home country criminal record like Thais have to produce to get longer stay visas to farang countries?

I have seen people saying that but I haven't seen a direct quotation from a Revenue Department official confirming that. Actually they should have done that decades ago when the first DTAs were signed. Now there is only just over 6 months to go before the 2024 tax returns will be issued and people start filing with them. So let's hope they get them out in time.

I am also very concerned about proof on anything they might ask for from overseas. The kind of documents that RD staff are used to in Thailand, such as certified bank statements, certified tax receipts proper contract notes are often simply not available from overseas. The RD official in the Swiss embassy video make clear that they would requesting exactly that sort of stuff. The way it works when you file a tax return is different from in developed countries where it is a genuine honours system and you can file for a lifetime without ever being asked for a document or audited. The Thai RD request documentation for every item you declare some weeks or months after you file, unless they have it already in the form of e-receipt for example. Claiming tax credits for Thai dividends involves sending them an original hard copy of every single dividend certificate, even though you can give permission for the data to be fed directly to the RD from the TSD registry which is the registrar for 90% of Thai listed companies. For income from employment you have to send an original copy of your 50 bis document, even though that is filed directly with the RD by your employer. You don't need a good imagination to see how this mentality could be applied to things like capital gains from overseas (certified original copies of buying and selling contract notes) or foreign tax credits (an original tax receipt certified and stamped by the tax authority).

I am with you but the problem seems to be that the people in power seem to have an extremely arrogant attitude to expats. They only care about the super wealthy and even then they are preparing to blow up the LTR tax exemption because it only applies to remitted income which will be irrelevant under global taxation. For other expats, including those with Thai families, they couldn't care less is they drive them out or not. It is obvious that a lot of inflows to Thailand will be choked off, particularly due to the idiotic approach of introducing a remittance tax as a short term measure before going for the jugular with global tax. A lot of damage will be done by the remittance tax because it strikes directly at capital inflows - duh. And huge confusion and uncertainty is created by having two confliction foreign income tax systems introduced one after the other with no preparation in terms of regulations, training for staff or appropriate forms. It's all about generating more top line to please Tony and get promoted to positions with greater opportunities for corruption. To hell with the cost of generating the incremental revenue or the overall loss to the fixed capital formation caused by choking off capital inflows. You see this power group talking about "quick wins". This is what they win. Stuff that can be spun to make it look like a win but it's actually a loss. So sad for Thai people to get stuck with this type of government that they didn't elect.

But will they revise the forms? There have been DTAs with Thailand for 50 years and a small number of individual taxpayers have been claiming tax credits for decades without any space on the forms, presumably by having to draft a letter to the RD or have a tax lawyer do that. We half way through the year and no sign of these new forms and any official comment confirming they are working on them. It is quite possible they will just say, "If it ain't broke, why fix it?"

This refers to the imposition of VAT on small postal packages. The Thai press was reporting on 4 June that the cabinet had just approved the wording for the announcement and it would be announced in the Royal Gazette and become effective 15 days later. So far it doesn't appear to have been announced in the Royal Gazette yet.

Last year they said that the reinterpretation was aimed at Thais investing overseas, not expats. That means small and medium sized Thai investors who use international accounts at Thai brokers to invest overseas and are low hanging fruit. Of course they cannot get the super wealthy Thais because they keep their offshore wealth in tax efficient family office corporate structures in countries that don't tax things like capital gains from offshore. That means that under Thai global taxation they will only have to pay tax on capital gains on stocks, if they want to pay out dividends to themselves. Otherwise they can trade freely generating untaxable capital gains and let their wealth accumulate further. Smaller Thai investors overseas will have to pay Thai tax on capital gains in the year the arise whether they remit or not. Recognising that they will not get much from wealthy Thais, I think this has now morphed into a plan to get tax from anywhere they can, including collecting another 7,000 baht from Joe Bloggs' already taxed pension in Nakhorn Nowhere. Given their keenness to collect 7 baht VAT on 100 baht packages sent from China, it doesn't seem that there is any concern about collecting revenue costing more than the revenue raised. They are only going to judge themselves on top line revenues, not net revenues after costs which is pathetic.

That's funny. Do they think that more and more protectionist measures will make people want to buy from uncompetitive Thai businesses? Accept reality.

This anti-weed sentiment is all contrived to support the order given by capo di tutti capi aka Tony to make weed illegal. No public consultation needed. No issue that it destroys businesses, jobs and tax revenue and that it is going against the global trend to legalise. Tony wants this and he will get it or he will throw the teddy out of the pram. This minister was installed kicking out his more reasonable predecessor purely to get this done. Then he can be binned too. If genuine public debate were allowed without a predetermined conclusion and they still came to this decision, then fair enough.

Not sure of the relevance of your comment. Thailand is already in CRS. I believe they are contemplating applying to join OECD at this stage. I guess they are far from meeting the requirements and can’t see what benefits would accrue to an economy stuck in the middle income trap with no obvious route out - GDP growing well below the rate of developed countries and regional neighbors, a hopeless public education system despite massive budgets, years of incompetent economic management, massive corruption at all levels and a flawed democracy with a tendency to military coups that can ignore the result of general elections and appoint convicted felons to the cabinet and allow one to control it from behind the scenes while still on probation.

There are transactional taxes for buying and selling property, regardless of the buyer or seller’s tax residence. It depends on appraisal value and how long the seller has owned the property. Generally around 3.5-5% of the appraisal price payable at the time of transfer at the land office. An individual seller doesn’t need to include in his tax return but corporate sellers do. Non-tax residents have no tax to pay on remitting the funds in to pay for the condo under current or future rules but a tax resident might have to under the current rule. If you rent it out, a non-tax resident or tax resident both pay Thai tax on the rental income which has to be done twice a year for rental income because that is considered a business done in personal name. Tax liability in this case or not, I guess the condo market is already taking a hit from the current rule, although developers are not complaining yet. Expats already tax resident but currently renting can’t be rushing to remit their savings to buy condos under the threat of a letter from the RD asking them to clarify the tax assessability of the remittance perhaps several years after the event. Retirees looking for a spot to retire may think twice about a place that was a tax haven for expats with no tax on offshore income since taxation started suddenly introducing a remittance tax and then announcing they will do global taxation 5 months after that. That is not to mention the introduction of LTR visas with tax exemption for remitted income with great fanfare. Then folk who have submitted all the detailed personal information to apply and paid the steep fees find that less than a year into their 10 year visas the government will blow up the tax exemption on remittances and tax all their offshore income whether it is remitted or not. That is not to mention the chaos of introducing the first rule precipitously without producing any clarification in the complex applications of 61 different DTAs and with no way to claim tax credits on tax return forms. They give the impression of being angry, xenophobic 5 year olds suddenly put in charge of the country’s tax system pulling this lever and that in quick succession to see if they can make foreign cash tumble out on to the ground like playing a one armed bandit and hoping for a quick jackpot.

The Post article didn’t say it would be effective from 2024, as stated here. It didn’t give a start date.

Could be a random pic of any couple blurred out

Those with overseas stock portfolios who are not liable to foreign capital gains tax will be bed and breakfasting just before it comes in, i.e. selling stocks with gains and buying them back to reset Thai taxable gains to zero. Some may be able to do the same with property by transferring to another name, although gift tax rules may apply. Thai gift tax rules presumably apply too but they have no way of knowing that a change of ownership of overseas property has taken place.

One of the major concerns is the same as for the remittance tax. That is that RD officials will demand the same type of documentation that is available in Thailand, i.e. foreign tax receipts certified by the tax authority, proper contract notes for stock transactions, official dividend receipts showing tax deductions etc. Otherwise they might just make you pay tax on the gross amount with no tax credit. If the proceeds from a stock sale of $100k is appears in the CRS report for your bank account and you have made a $50k profit but can't produce an official contract note for buying it 10 years earlier or for selling it, that's you paying 35% tax on the whole $100k. The Thai system is not the same as countries like the US and the UK where you file a self assessment and they accept that in the vast majority of cases without demanding documentation - only if they do an audit. In the Thai system you file your tax return online like that but a letter follows a few months later demanding original documents to support your income and documents in every case. If you file in person with an RD officer, which I have never done, I believe they will ask for the documents on the spot.

There is a thread on AN today saying this proposal has only just been approved by the cabinet. Next stage is a finance ministry order in the Royal Gazette that could happen soon. Then it will come into effect 15 days later. It is going to be in effect till the end of this year and will be reviewed to decide whether it will be extended or not. I guess a foregone conclusion that, no matter how much chaos it causes or how costly it is to collect amounts of tax under 10 baht, it will be hailed as great success and made permanent, assuming the government is still in power.

Thaksin can also change his mind quickly, e.g. he refused to agree with MFP on amnesty for lese majeste offenders when they were negotiating over a coalition but now he has been charged with LM himself PT is suddenly proposing amnesty for LM offenders. He is smart but impetuous and stubborn and doesn't always think things though. He could have avoided the first coup by just volunteering to pay quasi tax on the SHIN sale. He could have made a large donation equivalent to tax to the poor that he controlled and got huge brownie points from the reds and thwarted the yellows. He could have recovered the "tax" very fast by staying in power. He didn't think of that or was too stubborn and tight fisted to do it. Next he didn't think though the rice pledging scam or didn't listen to advice about it. He believed he could corner the global rice market by buying up Thai stocks with taxpayer money and storing it. But he used historic numbers over the prior periods when India had continuous droughts and floods that allowed very little exports. He didn't take into account the risk that India would have good weather and a bumper harvest which it did allowing it to export big time. Vietnam also had a good harvest that year and made big exports trashing the global price and leaving the Thai government sitting on huge losses, totally powerless to corner the rice market as he planned. He also didn't consider or care that he was putting his sister at grave risk of going to prison or having to flee. In spite of all this there was still money to be made from the fake sales to China that were actually pledged back to the Thai government. But whatever was made from that part, it is hard to argue that this scam was not a catastrophic failure on many levels. Several minions went to prison for taking fairly modest bribes to facilitate the scam and are still there. In the current context, I feel that Thaksin had already organised his overseas affairs long ago to avoid having to pay significant Thai tax as a result of this tax change.

He is a lawyer and says he doesn't know what steps are involved in amending laws in Thailand which is odd. On the other hand he is right to point out that the director general of the Revenue Department doesn't have the power to amend the Revenue Code herself. What her predecessor did in reinterpreting the law to introduce the remittance tax is highly questionable legally and could be challenged which may be a reason for the haste in moving on to try to amend the law. Since he was unable to inform what steps are involved, here they are. 1 Cabinet approval 2 Vetting of the proposed draft by the 'Council of State, the government's official legal advisor. 3 a, Royal Decree amending the Revenue Code. OR 3 b. Bill to amend the Revenue Code. 4. Three readings of the bill in parliament. 5. Announcement in Royal Gazette of Act to amend the Revenue Code. The Royal Decree is supposed to be used for urgent legislation that can't wait for the parliamentary process and is frequently used for fairly minor tax amendments. An amendment like this is a major change and it would be appropriate to use the full parliamentary process. However, Thaksin sponsored administrations in the past have been quite notorious for using Royal Decrees for non-urgent legislation when an Act of parliament would have been appropriate. It is a bit of a risk because a Royal Decree can theoretically be challenged and overturned in parliament later with negative consequences for the government that issued it. However, if you very confident in your parliamentary majority, you might not care about this risk. They could argue that collecting more tax is a matter of great urgency. Hopefully the parliamentary process would be used to follow democratic norms and legitimize a major change but no guarantees with this government.

I agree with you that it feels like a serious of electric shocks and you didn't even mention, if you are a medical cannabis user or not. You are now living under a Thaksin regime. Authoritarianism doing things in a hurry with great confidence, often taking legislative shortcuts, ignoring democratic principals, without thinking them through or worrying about any unintended consequences that can be mopped later or blamed on someone else. With a dose of xenophobia thrown in.

A practical idea but I doubt they could get their minds around that because they have to base everything on what is in the Revenue Code from which that would be a huge departure. They would also think there are people with income massively above that they wouldn't want to let off the hook. The UK introduced something like that for non-doms who are foreigners living in the UK with exemption from overseas income. They told them they could either go on to full UK global tax or pay a flat rate of tax on a notional quite high income which meant they didn't have to file anything else, except on remittances. But the non-dom scheme has all but been blown up by the Sunak government. Essentially the reality is that they are not going to carve out exceptions for a group of foreigners they consider to be making only a marginal contribution. If they do, it will be along the line of the LTR visa to attract multimillionaires and then change the rules on them a couple of years later.

Here is what looks like a fairly accurate translation of an article I found in Thai in Today. It also contains the bit about a billion baht platform and I have found something posted in Thai on Pantip.com with the same wording. So I take back what I say about The Thaiger and the Post conflating the billion baht platform from another story about taxing mulitnationals but it is still unclear to me what is meant by the platform. It seems hardly likely that it refers to individuals earning a billion baht plus who will have no problem avoid most of this tax anyway. Also the Thai version refers to "platforms" earning a billion plus, not individuals. Perhaps it is to do with catching out local tax dodgers who are selling stuff on e-commerce platforms at home or abroad. Hopefully there will be follow up statements that will clarify this and other details. I still cannot find an original official Thai source for any of this, such as Thai PBS. Apart from the obvious fact that all revenue, customs and excise heads are under huge pressure from the Thaksin administration to help pay for the digital wallet, one reason for wanting to move on to global taxation so soon after introducing the remittance tax may be that that reinterpretation of a 1985 ruling is questionable legally and could easily be challenged. But if proper legislation is on the way, that could head off legal challenges.

I know the Thaksin govt is putting the RD under huge pressure to get more tax from anywhere it can but, having just reinterpreted the law to tax post 2024 remittances, you would think they would be well advised to make that work first. There is still nowhere to claim tax credits for foreign tax on the tax return forms, nor any reference to them in the Revenue Code. Application of DTAs is a very complex subject and usually involves hundreds of pages of regulations which they have obviously not intention of doing. They started off saying this was aimed mainly at Thais investing overseas and for fairness but have dropped all that pretence already. Wealthy Thais can still easily avoid paying tax on current overseas income under this proposal because then can do their investments through family office companies in tax efficient jurisdictions that don't tax capital gains or dividends like Hong Kong and Singapore. That way they only have to pay Thai tax, if they decide to pay some of the income out in dividends, and can otherwise continue to accumulate their wealth tax free. I am sure Thaksin has a whole army of these family offices working for him overseas. Given that wealthy Thais have an easy way round this, it is extremely questionable that it will generate significant incremental tax revenue. As with the current remittance tax, the wealthy retirement sector that they seem keen to attract, will take a hit. It blows up the LTR visa tax exemption on remittances as the LTR visa holders will have to pay tax on their overseas income before they remit it, rendering the Royal Decree exemption redundant.

That is correct. Under the 2024 system if you remitted less that 120k of income from employment or occupational pension or less than 60k from other sources and had no local income, there is no need to file. Or probably in practice, if you have no income over the threshold. You could easily have enough savings in Thailand or income from Thai dividends taxed at a flat rate of 10% that don't need to be declared.