Dogmatix

I don't think that a total prohibition on discussion of gifting and gift tax would enhance the usefulness of this thread to members very much. Gifting was mentioned as being tax exempt up to the set limits by the RD in its original Q&A on P. 161/2566 with the obvious implication that gifts of foreign source income can be made in a tax exempt way. There must have been a significant amount of gifting done since the Gift Tax was introduced in 2016. What would be useful to members would be information about how this amendment has been applied by the RD. Prohibitions on discussion of certain key aspects of P. 161/2566 or unsupported assumptions by individual members about how the RD considers gifting are not a substitute for rolling up the sleeves and collating this type of information for the benefit of members. Time spent expressing unsupported opinions could be more usefully spent rolling up the sleeves and doing the digging.

Anutin has backpedaled on cannabis. His promise to make farmers rich from it turned out to be BS which made voter support for cannabis dwindle. He kept pretending that he only intended to legalize medical marijuana, even though that was obviously not what he wrote in his ministerial regulation. Of course he and his cronies with big plantations wanted to keep it legal but he has been bought off. He got the interior ministry with his own swat team to shake down pubs and stuff without having to involve the police outside Bangkok which has its own governor in control of pub licensing. In the cabinet reshuffle Thaksin didn't disturb him or any of his ministers and deputy ministers, despite chronic underperformance of his education minister and deputy interior minister, both of whom have unsavory pasts. Now Anutin is positioning himself for the next big legalization - casinos which Thaksin tried unsuccessfully to legalize before and is coming back for a second bite of the cherry. The BJP party team had a headstart to make big bucks from cannabis at 700 baht a gram. So they cleaned up. They are not going to rock the boat while they are in such a good position for a small party controlling interior, education and transport ministries, all lucrative A grade ministries, and well positioned for casinos.

No need to enact it through parliament. They can just do the reverse process that Anutin did to legalize it. Issue a public health ministerial regulation to amend the list of prohibited narcotics. So the cannabis bill will be scrapped. I guess it just goes back to the status quo before legalization, i.e. bottles of stuff with such low concentrations of CBC and THC as to be completely ineffective available at high prices with high doctor fees from holistic clinics. So the entire venture into medical marijuana is dead. I expect some may attempt to sue the government but the defence will be that their licences have expired and the government has every right not to renew them in order to protect the nation, given the plethora of fake news stories about babies being murdered and woman raped by crazed madmen high on cannabis. Welcome to the new Thaksin regime. He sacked the health minister who had some ideas about liberalizing things on speed pills to reduce over crowding in prisons and allow for rebab. That will go too. Thaksin came from the police and this liberalization of cannabis and other drugs has hit them hard in the pocket. Now the good times will roll for them again - extortion of small time users while police protected dealers are left untouched.

I just emailed a bank in Hong Kong, where I have a reasonable balance, to ask if they can provide a certified statement for Dec 2023. I am not holding my breath for a positive reply or even a reply at all but will post her, if I get one. If I get a negative reply, I will keep it in the tax file to show the RD, although they might ask for the email to be certified as well.

Exactly. That is my concern. Of course it is easy to use software to edit Pdf files. Under CRS reporting the RD should have access to your end 2024 bank balance. However, if we consider their system for checking on dividends paid by Thai companies, in the case the taxpayer claims a tax credit on them, they always ask for copies of all the dividend certificates, even though the taxpayer is filing his tax return online and the Thai stock exchange registry sends the dividend information directly to the RD. Admittedly they don't demand certified copies of the dividend certificates but this are printed and verifiable in Thailand and would be a lot harder to forge than Pdf files.

This gets back to the questions posed about P. 161/2566 before they issued P. 162/2566 which exempts pre-2024 foreign source income. The way the reinterpretation was drafted in 161/2566 implied that foreign source income earned going back to the year dot was assessable. 162/2566 drew a line at 1 Jan 2024 but, as time goes on, the original problem re-emerges. Thus with no further amendments of re-interpretations, if we look at, for example, the year 2060, is foreign source income earned in 2024 still assessable income or is deemed untaxable capital by then? The problem is that this wasn't thought through and it was done by an ambitious man in his last week in the job and eager to get the attention of politicians in power and be thought of as doer worthy of greater things in future. Since he had no authority to amend the law, he was limited to what he could to alter the interpretation of the existing law. This approach is bound to lead to endless problems in the execution of the chance but that was left to others to sort out. Now he is busy as permanent secretary for finance supporting Thaksin's daughter in her assertions that the governor of the BoT, an MIT trained former World Bank economist cannot understand the need to reduce interest rates.

If the recipient believes they have received a gift that is not assessable income, they should not include it in their tax return. So the only way the RD could challenge the recipient's position that it was a tax exempt gift would be, if the RD received information about the remittance or transfer and asked the recipient to clarify the payment to see whether it was assessable or not. Bearing in mind that domestic transfers can also qualify and there are millions of transfers made between individuals, any of which could be gifts, that will be a lot to sift through. Of course the RD could just go after foreign remittances but logically but they stand to find far more transfers that turn out to be undeclared assessable income purely in the domestic banking system, including payments for goods and services to sole traders who under declare their income or don't file anything at all.

For those who have already made remittances of pre-2024 foreign source income under P. 162/2566 or plan to in future, does anyone have any idea what evidence the RD would accept that it was pre-2024 income? This would only be required, if challenged by the RD, since there is no need to declare non-assessable income. Nevertheless, I think this is a very important point and have only seen advice from the expat tax advisors saying make sure you keep statements as evidence . The problem IMHO is that Thai banks will for a small fee provide certified hard copy statements signed and stamped by a bank teller. Thai auditors require certified statements for company accounts and this so this is the level of bank verification RD inspectors are accustomed to. I doubt if many banks in developed countries will provide this service. Most have already gone completely paperless for statements or will soon. So there may be a risk of being taxed on remittances that were tax exempt under P. 162/2566, if the RD follows up on the remittances. If would be nice, if the expat advisors would use their contacts at the RD, assuming they have any, to clarify this critical point.

Arrested for working online. So he was providing virtual massages.

If the cap fits.... Actually I was thinking of a Thai based expat tax advice site that stated categorically in a podcast I had just watched that some one residing in Thailand for less than 180 days would still be classified by the RD as tax resident, if they could not show they were tax resident in another jurisdiction in that tax year. This notion is based on OECD countries like the UK which will not let you out of their tax net when you move abroad, unless you can prove to them you have entered the tax net of another jurisdiction. But the definition of tax resident in Thailand is purely someone who spends over 180 days in the Kingdom without any of these OECD barbs attached to it - not yet anyway. This advice was not supported by an reference to the RC and was purely a figment of the "tax expert's" imagination. Judging by the comments some people had believed this which might put them off from moving to Thailand in the second half of a tax year and bringing enough loot with them to buy their condos and live the rest of their lives in the LoS without having to pay remittance tax.

I have seen some suggestions recently and earlier in the thread that a gift should be made overseas and then remitted to Thailand by the recipient. While I can understand the thinking behind this I suspect that the RD might consider the remittance as the potentially taxable event and might be unwilling to apply Thai gift tax rules to a gift made outside Thailand. That could mean they would classify the inward remittance from the recipient to himself as taxable income. At any rate for members who are considering making gifts to their Thai wife from offshore, most of the wives are unlikely to have offshore bank accounts or any means of opening them. The RD has a case study on its website that says a remittance from offshore to a legally married spouse in Thailand would be exempt under 20m. So why not use a methodology that the RD has already said is acceptable, rather than try to establish one for which there is no supporting evidence?

You are right re inheritances. Inheritances from overseas are taxable for Thai tax residents, even if not remitted to Thailand but there is a threshold of 100m for direct family members and 50m for others, while spouses are exempt. The flip side is that a beneficiary may remit their overseas inheritance to Thailand without incurring any additional tax. I think birthday gifts should qualify for exemption as gifts up to 10m, although amounts towards the upper limits might be investigated and not accepted as regular gifts.

I first came to Thailand hired from Hong Kong to set up a business for an international group in a highly regulated sector where licenses were required but new ones were no longer issued and there were foreign ownership restrictions tighter than the Foreign Business Act. There were already a few of our international competitors present in the Thai market using various structures - rep office, US treaty company and Thai jv. We didn't want a jv or any Thai ownership in the initial stage, although we acquired a licensed Thai company later. My task was to find the best legal structure and set up a business to add the Thai market to our regional network and compete aggressively with our foreign competitors who were already here or about to arrive. To this end I make appointments with the leading international law firms. The most useless of these was a young Thai lawyer at Baker and McKenzie who just read out excerpts from Thai laws at me for an hour and came to the conclusion that what I wanted to do could not legally be done in the Thai regulatory environment. I saw several farang lawyers, all of course working illegally, except one who had Thai nationality, because law is a protected profession in Thailand and between them they steered in what turned out to be the right direction which was the wholly owned rep office with alien business license. Later on I got to know one of our regulators very well who was later secretary general of his regulatory organisation and he talked openly about knowing that we and other foreign competitors were all in violation of our rep office licenses but they wouldn't do anything about it because they understood that Thai regulators had not created an appropriate legal structure for foreign firms to operate in the sector and the market needed foreign participation to generate investment and to bring expertise and training to develop the market. Eventually foreign ownership restrictions were eased and he told me he expected foreign firms to make acquisitions or enter into technical cooperation agreements with Thai firms and they would like to phase out the rep offices operating beyond their license terms. In fact they never did completely and there are still some today. The point of this story is that the legal and regulatory structure in Thailand is somewhat flaky and often times, someone just reading out Thai laws (even worse, if it is a farang reading out iffy translations of Thai laws and not having access to Thai cases and commentary) doesn't get the job done. If I had listened to the advice of the Thai lawyer at Baker McKenzie, rather than the practical advice of the illegal farang lawyers, I would have had to resign and go home and would have missed a lifetime opportunity. But I understand that the rules is the rules.

I think the problem is that the RD seems to give far less leeway on gifts that are not to spouses, children or parents. The wording sounds broad, "Maintenance income derived under a moral obligation or gifts made in a ceremony or on occasions in accordance with established custom..." but there is a RD case study where the RD disallowed the payment of "maintenance" by a farang overseas to his gf in Thailand on the grounds that that they were not officially married. If they had been married, the implication is that it would have been accepted. There are other cases when a lower court disallowed a gift to a relative who was not a spouse, parent or child on the grounds that it was not made on the occasion of a ceremony or occasion (such as marriage). So I would avoid gifts to a partner to whom you are not legally married to completely to be safe. For gifts to spouses, children and parents, there is no case material that I have been able to find giving any indication of how the RD, in the total absence of any detailed regulations, might check that the giftor has not be able to benefit from the gift. This would be particularly difficult in the case of spouses who typically have comingled funds and whose assets acquired after marriage are automatically deemed common conjugal assets under the Civil and Commercial Code, regardless of which spouse's name they are in. Perhaps some cases will emerge in future. Gift Tax Case RD KK0702-530 11 Feb 2023.docx

A picture of Thaksin surrounded by 100 of his bodyguards walking down a street he wouldn't normally be seen dead in. Quite ridiculous. Thaksin was hated in most of the South including Phuket before he went on his extended holiday. I wonder how much that has changed, now that most Thais under 30 have only a vague idea who is or was.

No idea what was in his disrespectful videos but it seems to me that Thai police should rolling up their sleeves and going out to catch dangerous criminals, rather wasting taxpayer money on this sort of nonsense which is also interfering with freedom of expression and making Thailand look stupid.

For those filing taxes, it's worth knowing about the system of tax deductions for shopping. For the last few years Thai governments have been offering tax deductions for shopping. It started off at 30k but for the 2024 tax year it was increased to 50k. You need a tax receipt and from this year it was necessary to buy from a retailer registered in the e-tax receipt system which all the big ones are. Last year I got e-tax receipts, even though that wasn't yet compulsory. When I did my tax return online last month the shopping tax deduction just popped up automatically. If you are married and opt for joint filing, you both get the 50k deduction but the spouse's tax receipts must be in her name. To get the tax receipts take along your passport and evidence of your TIN. This year's scheme ran from 1 Jan to 15 Feb. So the next opportunity will probably be next January for the 2025 tax year.

Talking about tax receipts for the last few years Thai governments have been offering tax deductions for shopping. It started off at 30k but for the 2024 tax year it was increased to 50k. You need a tax receipt and from this year it was necessary to buy from a retailer registered in the e-tax receipt system which all the big ones are. Last year I got e-tax receipts, even though that wasn't yet compulsory. When I did my tax return online last month the shopping tax deduction just popped up automatically. If you are married and opt for joint filing, you both get the 50k deduction but the spouse's tax receipts must be in her name. To get the tax receipts take along your passport and evidence of your TIN.

Your accountant is correct. You will have to present tax receipts in the company name to claim deductible expenses. My house was originally purchased in my company name and I set up the utilities in the company name, imagining I could charge all to the company. But the accountant said your office is only about 1/8th of the house, so you can only charge 1/8th of the utilities to the company. The account vets the documents and hands it to the auditor who trusts her and approves on her say so with only limited scrutiny. So the accountant is really doing the auditor's job for her.

A lot of people spend many years working abroad and marry a foreigner but plan to retire in the UK. I think they should make the threshold the same as the state pension which is the lowest in Western Europe by long way, while healthcare in the UK is also the worst nowadays.

Thailand's first effort was to go after large tech companies like Netflicks selling into Thailand without a permanent establishment to try to avoid tax. Made them register for VAT which I think has been fairly successful. The small packages tax was originally in the same bill but was dropped by the Prayut government.

I had a problem like that on an expensive item ordered for 2,000 euros in a Black Friday sale with free shipping offered too. The vendor put the gross value before discount and the shipping cost before deducting it on the invoice, then deducted the discount. Guess what? I was forced to pay duty and VAT on the gross price plus shipping.

Amazon and Ebay and some couriers have been operating a system whereby Thai taxes are collected in advance which means that items can be delivered to your door. The taxes are described as deposits and you could be charged more or get a refund. On the rare occasions I have used this service, I have been charged more than the actual Thai import duty and VAT but not got refunds. Others have told me they have received refunds from the Amazon service though. Both Amazon and Ebay have never distinguished items valued at less than 1,500 baht and charged Thai tax on them anyway which was not refunded. I guess the way to go for Aliexpress and for items drop shipped from Lazarda and Shopee from China to Thailand will be to do something similar but only charge VAT below 1,500 which is easier because the rate is a universal 7%, whereas import duty varies from 5% to 40%. There should also be a system to pay VAT online for packages sent by individual senders or those too small to get into this type of sender. But introducing it through a bureaucratic order, bypassing parliament without any of this in place and without worrying about the volume of packages on which the cost to collect it will be more than the VAT is undemocratic, shameful and stupid - all hallmarks of this latest Thaksin government.

And will cause inflation and chaos with no benefit to anyone.

Packages not exempted by the current regulation are taxed on the landed cost value. That means import duty applied to the landed cost which includes insurance and freight. Then VAT is applied to that. Some items like wine also have excise duty and municipal tax applied before the VAT. But VAT has always applied to imports of goods in Thailand ever since it was introduced. If you import products that are manufacturing inputs or you re-export the whole thing. as you say, you can claim the Thai VAT charged at import back. But you cannot claim back any foreign taxes and I doubt China charges VAT on exports anyway.