Dogmatix

I doubt it. It must be a huge amount of data for anyone to sift through. Thousands of foreign passport details, the vast majority of which are not tax residents and no way to distinguish them. I think the details are probably just kept for a while in case of money laundering or passing of forged currency. Then trashed. However, the RD must have the right to sift through it, if it feels the urge.

Good points. Another issue is that demand for speed pills went down and prices fell. When cannabis was illegal trade in speed pills and meth was far greater than the trade in cannabis. Police and influential persons involved in the yaba trade suffered. Speed pills and meth are much easier to produce than cannabis and are more compact and easier to smuggle and distribute. The government wants to give police and related criminals a double bonus - restore the profitability of the huge yaba trade and give them back their cannabis trade. The newly released despot has always favoured police complete with its all encompassing criminal enterprises.

With a tiny sample and loaded questions they can get opinion polls in Thailand to say whatever they want.

Before decriminalization there was copious supply of cheap brick weed grown by Thai politicians and other influential Thai people in Laos. It was low quality and grown with liberal amounts of toxic pesticides. Now the cheapo brickweed is apparently still flowing but there is also oversupply of better quality weed, both grown locally and smuggled from the US through lavish bribes paid to the customs dept. Where is it all supposed to go? The cheap brickweed was a staple product was always there and isn't going away. The supply of the better stuff will probably diminish and go up in price but won't go away entirely and customs officers still need money to pay for luxury cars, mansions and prestigious overseas schools and universities for their kids, while earning pitiful government salaries. Now police, who have been out in cold for two years, will also jump back in and seize back their control of distribution networks plus busting backpackers who buy their product on the islands. Another brilliantly thought through policy to appease the capriciousness of one elderly convicted criminal who has bought his way back into power.

I enquired about getting certified statements from a bank where I have an account in HK, not expecting anything. Two weeks later I finally got a reply saying that certified statements can be ordered for HK$50. So I will get one for Dec 2023.

I don't think they have the resources to step up resources. Their inspectors apparently have quite a backlog already.

Yes. Sorry for the typo.

Clearly things will be extremely chaotic in implementing a most likely unlawful re-interpretation by a bureaucrat without any supporting regulations or preparation whatsoever and involving the application of dozens of slightly different DTAs which RD officers have never had a reason to even look at, let alone fully understand how to implement them. I was giving some thought to what types of remittance will be easiest to handle and which will, in my humble opinion alone, be least likely to attract unwelcome attention from the RD. I give my own rankings. Others will have different opinions. 1. Documented loan from offshore company. 2. Gift to spouse. 3. Remittance from balance already in bank account prior to 1 Jan 2024. 4. Remittance of capital gains from stocks where no tax has been paid (this one is easy because no DTA tax credit is available - just pay Thai tax in full.) 4. Remittance of income from employment or pension claiming DTA tax credit. 5. Remittance of dividends or investment gains claiming DTA tax credits. 6. Remittance of rental income on a monthly or quarterly basis. (This one is a complete PITA because you have to file a mid year PND 94 with estimate of full year income as well as year end PND 90. In addition you will have to claim tax credits under DTAs. Probably best never to remit post 2024 property income, sell the property and/or leave Thailand, if you are dependent on rental income to survive in Thailand.) Just my ideas that don't constitute advice to anyone.

You can usually file on the first working day on the new year. I remember once online filing was delayed by about a week due to a glitch. No you can't file early but you can file late, if willing to pay the late fine which is not much. You can file online from abroad, if you can cope with the Thai language pop-ups in tiny print

Curiously useless to say there will be stringent new regulations in about a week's time without saying what they are.

A bit meaningless with no info about who is in the family and what are their sources of income.

Decriminalizationis not an initiative of the government. It is an order from Thaksin to his flunkies Somsak and Srettha who can’t survive 5 minutes in office without Thaksin’s support. No consultative or democratic processes involved. It was not Peru’s Thai policy until recently. Srettha assured the weed shop owners they could stay in business soon after he took office. The country is now ruled by one man.

If you are selective, you can easily dig up evidence to support your case whether you are pro or con. But what is clear in this situation is that all of these arguments are for show as the decision is up to one man alone, who owns the government, and he decided long ago he don't want no drugs, regardless of any evidence either way or economic growth or tax generation. Somsak and Srettha are just flunkies with no decision making power following orders. Cholnan tried to exercise a bit of independence at the Health Ministry and tighten up but not ban completely but got the axe for his pains. There is no consultative or democratic process here. Anutin will not put up any resistance because his boss have already made good money from this, particularly when prices were really high, and now he is getting even fatter and happier from his current government position. It's a shame for him that the Mary Jane train has to stop but he will certainly not rock the boat.

No other car. She drove at the other pick up, kept her foot on the floor until she could see it had cleared the parapet, then braked to make sure she didn't follow it over.

Cannabis farmers are pushing for decriminalisation because legalisation made the price drop precipitously. I am not sure how recriminalisation will put their hash cookies back in the jar and get prices back up again. Definitely won't do much for government tax revenue collection.

A male prisoner, who is also facing a lese majeste charge but mysteriously not indicted for it, appeared in great health when he arrived at the prison to start serving his sentence but was air lifted hospital the first. The Corrections Department and the government said that all prisoners are treated equally. So why wasn't Bung flew to hospital before she showed any symptoms, just like that male prisoner?

Unlikely.

That is possible but my experience with the RD is that they request documentation on anything in the tax return they don't already have direct inputs for. So it would be a departure from their current practice to let declared foreign source income go by on the nod. It could be that they will take the approach you suggest for practical reasons for the first few years. Another issue will be foreigners who show up at RD officers to let the staff do their tax returns for them. Unless there is direct order not to request any supporting documentation, it will be hard to restrain these folk from demanding it.

Perhaps both!

Conscripts, prisoners and people in some dirt poor African countries will enjoy eating this delicious product like it was an aged Talisker malt whisky. For sure the successful sale of this rare product at a premium to fresh rice will be used to reduce Yingluck's fine for causing economic damage to the country when she comes home as a free woman in the near future.

That would be the case with a UK tax return reporting foreign income for global taxation. But current Thai tax returns done online compute the tax payable after deductions for you and foreign source income must be entered in the spaces provided under the various sections of the Revenue Code that the income arose. Thus pension income must be entered in the section for income from employment. Once you have done that, the system will add it to the total of assessable income. It is possible that new forms will be designed with lengthy sections dealing with foreign source income and spaces to apply for tax credits incorporating the nuances of all 61 DTAs. In this case they might ask taxpayers to enter gross pre-tax foreign source income without taxing the gross amount. But I think this is a fantasy and for now you should only declare assessable income.

Those Carl Turner podcasts are good in parts like the curate's egg but the bits that are wrong or misleading are worrying. In one of them he claimed that the RD gets a quarterly print out of all credit card expenditures on foreign cards by all Thai tax residents. I checked with two overseas banks where I have accounts and they said that was complete nonsense and it is clearly not something reported under CRS. He replied to a request for a source by sending the details of CRS reporting which made clear it was not true. In the podcast about the UK DTA the expert said you would have to declare the gross pre-tax UK taxed income on your Thai tax return and claim the tax credit. This is clearly wrong because Thailand is taxing on a remittance basis. So why would you declare gross UK income to the RD? If you do that they will tax the gross amount and you will pay Thai tax on the UK tax paid before getting a tax credit. I would think you should declare on the amount remitted to Thailand net of UK tax and claim the tax credit against that. The expert is obviously used to global taxation systems where you have to declare the gross amount because all income is taxable whether it is remitted or not. He was apparently unable to adjust his example for the remittance basis. I stopped listening after hearing several serious errors in these podcasts and finding nothing of value that I didn't already know. But as I said, they are good in parts, if you are able to steer clear of the toxic parts that might do you financial damage.

Don't take this as gospel but my take would be: 1. I think your gains in 2024 are Thai assessable income because P. 161/2566 specifies foreign income earned in any prior year without limitation, although that was later reduced to any year starting from 1 Jan 2024 by P. 162/2566. This is one of the big problems of a remittance tax on foreign earnings without detailed regulations. If this reinterpretation survives long term, folk could be looking paying Thai tax on 2024 earnings in 2044. Anyway it looks as if you would have to claim a tax credit for tax paid in 2024, if you remit the gains in 2026 or 2027. Many will not have paid any foreign tax on capital gains on stocks in countries where they are not tax resident. Most jurisdictions are keen on charging withholding tax on dividends but even the US doesn't tax non-residents on cap gains. 2. There should be no Thai tax to pay on investments that resulted in losses or break even but how your prove this, if the RD queries the remittance may be a different story. 3. The 100k principle should not be taxable in Thailand. What you describe is the UK system for non-doms, i.e. the UK taxman requires that you classify remittances based on the highest tax liability first. So the interest which is taxable on remittance is deemed remitted until it is all gone. Then the tax exempt principle. That is in the UK regs but Thailand has no regs. So nothing to stop you saying you remitted the tax exempt principle first and left the interest to earn more interest. RD officials will not be able to cope with this because they are trained to cite clauses in the Revenue Code to support their decisions. In this case, they have nothing when the taxpayer argues that he remitted pre-2024 principal and never intends to remit the interest. If the case went to the tax court, the judges would either have to make up a law though a ruling or say it is up to the taxpayer to decide whether he remitted principle or income. You can easily see what a mess this is going to lead to with Thai investors who have been actively investing overseas for many years, since the Thai economy and stock market went ex-growth, due to incompetent and corrupt economic management for years and they could see NASDAQ always going through the roof. But this is pure Thaksinism. Issue a decree or an order to do what you want to do without bothering to think it though, completely bypassing parliament and the democratic process and let minions mop up the mess and try to make it work. If it can't be made to work, it was done by bureaucrat,. not the government and he can take the blame.

I think it's the thin end of the wedge. VAT will go up to 10% sooner or later and I saw some official quoted saying they are looking at a unified import duty rate for low cost items. I think that is the reason they have not imposed duty as well at this stage. It is too complicated to impose duty when you have to go through the complex HS codes to figure out what the tax rate is which could be anywhere between 5% and 40%. They will force the big vendor sites to charge 7% VAT and pay it to them. When that's up and running, they may decide on uniform 10% duty for all items up 1,500 or $40. Then with VAT up to 10%, there will be an add on of 20%, just like Brits pay in VAT. I think we will see that within 5 years. 7% is not so painful on cheap goods but 20% is more so.

When it becomes effective, Thai consumers should run a campaign for everyone to order as many dirt cheap items from China as they can afford in one go to overload the system and make the government reconsider. 555