Dogmatix

As in my post above I think this is not correct. P 162/2566 exempts permanently any income earned before 1 Jan 2024 whenever it is remitted.

When you say anything remitted before end Dec 2023 is not taxable I think that income earned in 2023 is taxable and possibly savings that you cannot show were generated as income prior to 2023. Remember that P 161/2566 comes into effect on 1 Jan 2024 and the old rule is still in force till then. P 162/2566 modified P 161/2566 which only comes into effect on 1 Jan. So income generated and remitted in 2023 is still under the 1985 RD ruling and therefore taxable. In future we might be dealing with income arising anywhere in the world being taxable regardless of remittance to Thailand, if the RD can get this government or a successor government to amend the RC in that way, as they apparently want to do. That might also necessitate a sort of amnesty for prior savings like P 162/2566. If all income generated before the start year is deemed non-assessable, then taxpayers could start with a clean slate and pay tax only on income arising from that date. It is OK for the RD to announce to the world what they feel the government and parliament should do. In fact it is the role of bureaucrats to make recommendations of this type on the understanding it is up to government and lawmakers whether they choose to follow the recommendations or not. But what is not OK in my book is when the bureaucrats use underhand methods to exceed their authority by effectively amending the law themselves in an unlawful manner, e.g. P 161/2566. But nothing to be done about it.

You can always file a case in the Central Tax Court, if you disagree with the RD and the amount at stake is worth paying lawyers for several years and you can have the tax plus penalties and interest available in case you lose the case. You might a precedent that would be helpful to others, if Thai courts didn't have a habit of ignoring precedents.

Some up dated advisories in the light of P 162/2566 from BM, EY and SCB for interest. The BM document is just in slide form. One slide gives the idea of using an offshore company to remit a "genuine loan" to the company's 100% owner who is tax resident in Thailand. It says this is not assessable but doesn't define "genuine loan". SCB reiterates the point from the Prachachart Thurakit article that a RD source said they want to amend the Revenue Code to tax all foreign source income in the year it arises, regardless of whether remitted to Thailand or not. I guess that is where we are headed eventually and a future MFP government with plans for enhanced welfare funded by an iniquitous wealth tax and other new taxes would probably make that more likely. Baker McKenzie 24 Nov 2023.pdf EY 28_Nov_2023[1].pdf

The hospital room needs to be vacated for Yingluck. The Admin Court will give the standard fob off ruling that the petitioner was not personally impacted and throw out the case.

Soft power is meaningless and there is no accountability for the projects and consulting contracts to cronies that 5 bn of taxpayer dosh with generate. This is definitely a scam to rip off the taxpayer again and give PT PR machine a platform to get Ung Ing into obsequious Thai media while she waits for Srettha to plunge through the trap door. The 5 bn spend on nothing is inconsistent with Srettha's daily insistence that the economy is in deep crisis and needs to be bailed out with borrowings of 500 bn to pay for his vote buying pledge.

The authorities will see to it that the loan sharks can no longer charge more than a 15% interest rate per year from any of their debtees, the prime minister said. 555. Most recent governments had an initiative like this but nothing palpable came of it. The large loan sharks all pay for protection or are family of police, military, local officials or politicians.. "Debtees". A ridiculous made up word. Never heard of debtors.

Singapore and HK, despite the small populations, have a lot of wealthy locals and because they have never had capital controls or any restrictions on investing overseas, you have a lot more investment income going back and forth for overseas investment, probably a lot more than from Thailand. It is locals' similar foreign source income that the RD wants to catch. Expats and foreign retirees are irrelevant to the equation in all three jurisdictions. Thailand is doomed if it is going to rely on higher tax rates and a broader tax net to improve the standard of living. HK and Singapore have done it by carefully maintaining competitiveness in all matters, including education and taxation to attract foreign investment through which most productivity gains flow, and hence GDP growth. Grow the pie faster and collect the same tax at lower tax rates. Thailand faces ever shrinking competitiveness, as seen in its shrinking share of FDI in SE Asian over the last quarter century. More heavily taxing a shrinking pie or a pie growing at a slower rate is probably not the answer but may be consistent with the type of short term fix thinking behind borrowing 3% of GDP to give away.

I have a practical question about the implications of the new order P 162/2566. I was planning to remit some funds before the end of the year but but these are old savings for which I have no records of tax being paid. The remitting account has also received some income during this year. So I was concerned the remittance could be interpreted as this year's income, if they adopt a LIFO approach. I assume that P 162/2566 may only be applicable from 1 Jan 2024 and that anything remitted before year end 2023 is taxable, if income deemed to have arisen in the same tax year under old interpretation. So, if it is remitted at beginning of Jan 2024, it is too early to be deemed as arising in 2024 and no income came into account yet in 2024. It is also covered by the P 162/2566 exemption for pre-2024 income. Am I missing something?

I have already posted about this. It applies to companies. As mentioned, the EU has applied pressure on HK and Singapore to eliminate tax schemes whereby multinationals structure overseas companies or shareholdings as or in a subsidiary of a Singapore subsidiary and remit the proceeds to Singapore. That will now be taxable and HK is considering similar legislation under similar pressure from the EU. However, foreign sourced personal income remitted to Singapore remains non-taxable https://www.iras.gov.sg/taxes/individual-income-tax/basics-of-individual-income-tax/what-is-taxable-what-is-not/income-received-from-overseas .

A friend had an experience that sounded very similar to this. Looking after a dog that a Thai missus and vet refuse to euthanase is not fun. I had this experience for 3 months with a beloved 16 year old dog and it was horrible to watch but our maid lovingly nursed and took care of her till the end when she couldn't walk any more and had difficulty eating and holding down food. Finally she was able to eat a hearty last meal and seemed to feel better but keeled over and died to our great relief. I wouldn't wish that on any dog or dog owner and I am still wary of having another dog in Thailand.

I think the comparison with HK and Singapore is very relevant to this question. How is it that they can comply with CRS without having to follow the rules on foreign source income you say come with that but Thailand would not be able to do likewise, if it so chose? But it seems you are unable to answer that. So let's move on.

Was your mate doing this in Thailand or some other jurisdiction? The Jimmy Carr scheme was a bit brazen but the article suggested it was going to take a couple of years for HMRC to come up with rules to close the loopholes. So does the RD have rules to prevent it? I guess they could deem a loan longer than a certain number of years as income but I am not aware of any rules like that in place. I wouldn't suggest doing this for someone working in Thailand as a way to avoid salary tax, certainly for payments coming in on a regularly monthly or quarterly basis. It could work for someone who has sold an assets overseas and wishes to remit some or all of the gains on an occasional basis. It might also be useful for people who have no easy way of showing what was principle or earnings generated prior to 2024 vs post 2024 assessable income. I suspect wealthy Thais will be using this type of method or back to back loans, as suggested by Prof Kitipong.

I see your points but I still think that Thailand would still be able to receive the same assistance and economic cooperation from OECD countries, if it choose to continue taxing foreign source income on a prior year remittance basis. I don't think that Singapore and HK are going to be cut out of any OECD pies for not taxing individuals' foreign source income. If there were real pressure, I think the OECD would want taxation of all foreign source income, not just on a remittance basis. The OECD doesn't have as big a gun as the US has individually. Countries that refused to comply with US FATCA would have been cut out from being able to make US dollar payments that have to do through a US correspondence bank. Some Thai financial institutions refuse to deal with clients who are US persons as a result of FATCA.

I have seen some mention here of generous tax deductions for self-employed persons up to 60% of revenue. As many may not be familiar with this I think it is worth pointing out that these deductions are intended for self-employed persons and unlimited partnerships that prefer not to submit audited accounts which might be more beneficial, if their expenses are more than the standard deduction of 60%, or whatever is permitted for their industry. If you take someone operating a restaurant or selling things from a rented shop, a 60% deduction might not seem overly generous. The 60% deduction has to cover all their costs of products or raw materials, rent, salaries for any staff, utilities, protection money to cops, interest on loans etc. This system is only suitable for small business because your progressive tax rate goes up to 35%, whereas the maximum corporate tax rate is 20%, while directors can charge some personal expenses like company car and driver and entertainment to the company as tax deductible. My point is that these deductions are not that generous, if you business is over a certain size or your total costs are over 60% of revenue and these deductions don't apply to foreign source income, which is subject to standard deductions the same as Thai salary income, so irrelevant to this topic.

If someone has a company in UAE or elsewhere, wouldn't it make more sense for the company to make loans to the Thai tax resident, rather than pay a salary? Loan agreements can be structured so that the repayments can be done from outside Thailand. Even if the Thai tax resident is a shareholder and/or director the RD cannot make objections to loans to them. Interest payments from Thailand would be subject to withholding tax but no need to pay interest from Thailand.

I can see the advantage to Thailand of joining in CRS reporting. Countries that don't will get shunned and even Switzerland had to join after years of resistance, while former tax havens like the British Virgin Islands now provide information such as beneficial owners and directors of companies (and from 2024 unaudited accounts) to foreign tax authorities on request. But what advantage will Thailand get from OECD by taxing foreign source personal income on remittance? What disadvantages do Singapore and HK get from joining CRS but continuing their policies not to tax individuals' foreign source income?

It's less generous than the Prayut governments shopping tax rebates. Those schemes allow you to get a tax rebate on 30,000 baht that was not limited to 10,000 but based on your top progressive tax rate. Under that scheme, if your top rate of tax is the maximum 35%, you would get 17,500 back on 50,000, not just 10,000.

That is the excuse or an exaggeration given by the RD but not very convincing. I think the real pressure was to join the CRS reporting which they have just done 5 years after other major players in the region. HK and Singapore have been under pressure from the EU to prevent double non-taxation of multinationals receiving passive income such as from sales of shares. That seems aimed at multinationals that structure things so that untaxed foreign sourced gains go into a HK or Singapore subsidiary. Singapore has actually just introduced legislation to tax this on a remittance basis with certain exemptions and HK is likely to soon. The idea is probably to discourage these structures, so EU multinationals will pay tax on the income at home. But there is no obvious pressure from OECD on HK and Singapore to introduce tax on foreign source income for individuals. No particular reason for them to care about it, since individuals cannot easily shift notional tax residencies of certain pools of income around like multinationals. As long as they get the CRS information on their own tax residents, I don't think there will much pressure from OECD on Thailand to tax its own tax residents' foreign source income. Srettha said it was about equality but I expect that was an opportunistic rebranding by him after the RD informed him they were doing it, while the RD's reason was mainly that they thought they may as well put the information they will receive from CRS to some useful purpose and see how much incremental tax it brings in.

I think a grey area but unlikely to be an issue since it is not currently an illegal substance. Technically it is illegal for the vendors to promote or sell online but that is just under the herbal medicines law I think and they haven't bothered to enforce it. But it is not specifically illegal to send it to a friend since it is not an online commercial transaction. I don't think you need to be registered with the FDA to send a legal substance to a friend as a gift. I believe you can send supplements like vitamins and indigestion tablets too. If you are worried get the vendor to send it direct.

PT is following in the fine tradition of the Yingluck government's rice pledging scam. Promised the money and got farmers to pledge all their jasmine rice to get cash they could use to buy sticky rice for their families to eat. Only Yingluck dissolved parliament suddenly without giving her finance minister Kitirat time to set up funding for all of it through BAAC. As a caretaker government they no longer had the power to force BAAC to advance the money which was questionable legally even before. About 20 farmers committed suicide as a result and many more faced grim hardship with no money and nothing to eat. Meanwhile they made out like bandits on the crooked deals they arranged to sell the farmers' rice they didn't pay for to fake Chinese government departments. Just promise good things to poor rural folk and take political credit for it and move on without bothering to follow up to see that they get paid.

Never realised she was a transgender before. You live and learn.

Sounds like an excellent excuse for more online censorship and surveillance resulting no reduction of online fraud..

Other countries tend to tax global income. Wealth taxes do exist, eg 0.5% of total wealth over a threshold but don't often work out very well and have been walked back in some countries like France, where a lot of wealthy people simply left. I take the position of Prof Kitipong that it would make more sense for the economy to avoid doing this so as to be competitive with HK and Singapore, which is what the previous PT government of Yingluck strove to do by reducing corporate income tax from 30% to 20%, a theoretical sacrifice in today's terms of about 300 billion or close to 2% of GDP, whereas this new approach is unlikely to raise anything like that. But, if you have to do it, try to make tax rates more in line with Thai tax rates in order to incentivise repatriation of capital, eg 10% on dividends, 0% on equities capital gains, 15% on interest. Also give more time to investors to adjust before implementation and legislate the change, rather than leave it to the RD to reinterpret the law in a way that is non-binding on taxpayers and subject to legal challenges. Re global income tax of Thai tax residents, the Prachachart Thurakit article said the RD wants to amend the Revenue Code to introduce this. So this may be only a stop gap. Whichever way you look at it, Thailand has a fairly low tax take and will need to increase that to meet the growing expectations of welfare, given that GDP growth is expected to continue to underperform due to lack of competitiveness. That probably means higher personal and corporate tax rates, higher VAT, higher inheritance and gift taxes with lower thresholds, as well as global income tax collection.

You got off topic by making condescending remarks about people you objected to criticising this poorly thought out tax policy and suggesting they shouldn't be in Thailand, since only people who accept chaotic policy making should be here.