Dogmatix

Historically that was the case but the Prayut government introduced an amendment that requires tax filing for employees, which should technically include pensioners, who have assessable over 120k pa. after deductions - less for non-employment income. At the time the government said the requirement was to allow the government to identify and assist low income earners with reverse taxation, i.e. pay them welfare instead of taxing them. This was obviously BS as there have been no moves in this direction and the real motivation for processing millions of zero tax returns remains unclear. Contrary to paying reverse tax to the needy, one of the last moves on welfare by the Prayut government was to axe the old age allowance of 600 to 1,000 a month depending on age. Interior Minister General Anuphong said it was ridiculous for people like him with decent government pensions to receive the old age allowance and that welfare for the elderly should be on a selective means tested basis. It was pointed out to the minster by journalists that he was actually ineligible for the old age allowance because he is in receipt of a government pension. So much for policy due diligence which I fear is also seriously lacking in this remittance tax initiative.

BTW I don't think RD audits for PIT that doesn't include business income are very common. Touch wood I have never had one and have not heard of anyone who had one other than a foreigner who ceased filing tax returns and they wanted to know why. Audits are a lot more common for companies ( I have had one) and possibly sole trader businesses which are filed as PIT but are a lot simpler than company tax returns because most traders opt for a flat rate of expense deductions to avoid having to get audited accounts done. The MO of the RD vis a vis PIT is that after receiving your tax return, they will write to you asking for documents to clarify any income declared or deductions claimed that they don't already have an electronic record of and some that they do, eg PAYE salary and Thai dividends. So it is not like, say UK tax, where you make your declaration and they don't normally ask for any further evidence but may come back and do an audit. The Thai RD is doing a mini audit when they receive the tax returns. The problem is of course that P. 161/2566 and P. 162/2566 plus all the DTAs can potentially cause serious disruption to the RD simple process of verification of Thai income and deductions and will potentially overload the system. That is not to mention the obligation to be placed on RD officers to try to figure out the correct tax filing of expat pensioners for them, as 99.9% will be unable to file for themselves online like most Thais do nowadays. Whether the snap judgements of inexperienced RD officers doing the filings for expats will be accepted or whether the next level up that reviews them will demand extensive additional documents to review remains to be seen.

Most of the DTAs I have seen allow the country of residence to tax all pensions including home country state pensions (with the exemption of government pensions paid to former government employees). The only one I have seen that doesn't allow general state pensions to be taxed in the country of residence is the US treaty. Someone posted that the Dutch treaty says state pensions "shall" be taxed in Holland, which may be true but I haven't looked it up to verify this. Many people get confused with the DTA wording that says "may be taxed" in the country of origin and believe this means that the country of origin has the sole right to the tax. This is only true if the wording is "shall be taxed", as in the US treaty vis a vis Social Security, rather than "may be taxed". That means that Thailand has the option to tax foreign state pensions or not and the RD has already declared its intention to tax all pensions that it can (subject to DTA tax credits). This was affirmed in the Swiss embassy interview. Of course, since nothing has been written down, there could easily be a Thai flip flop, when they understand the cost and trouble of collecting paltry amounts of tax from expat pensioners who are unable to do their own tax returns.

PIT on domestic cap gains is almost unheard of in Thailand. As you mention gains on SET listed stocks traded through the market and domestic funds are exempt. As far as securities are concerned that leaves gains on sales of unlisted equities and gains on private off market sales of SET stocks which are not things the average PIT taxpayer ever home. There is no cap gains tax on Thai property because there is a formula to work out taxes on property which have to paid at the Land Office. The tax computation doesn't take into account the capital gains and it is considered separately from PIT, so that you can sell as many billions of baht worth of property at a huge profit as you like and won't increase your top marginal tax rate. This means that the average RD officer has little or know knowledge of Thai cap gains, let alone how they are treated in foreign tax jurisdictions or what tax credits they may qualify for for.

The OP doesn't mention what is new. Thai banks have had due diligence in place for new accounts for many years already.

I doubt Prayut or Pravit are dope smokers and both were probably not in favour of the decriminalization. It was a policy of Anutin's BJP which Prayut and Pravit tolerated. Neither ever said anything in favour or against to my knowledge.

Obviously purely Thaksin's idea. Puppet PM Srettha didn't mention anything about a policy to completely decriminalize. He talked about stricter control, as already advocated by Anutin from the beginning and told weed shop owners they would still be allowed to continue in business. Now Thaksin is out of hospital and taken off the neck brace, he is showing his fangs and taking control of everything, based on the non-existent mandate of a lost election.

As far as we know, the application of DTAs in Thailand, apart from some odd PIT cases of which only one is recorded on the RD website which very straightforward, has been mainly related to corporate income tax. Large Thai companies do business overseas through subsidiaries which are taxed in the countries they are domiciled and not subject to Thai tax. Cases where Thai tax arises for a Thai corporate would be, amongst other things, capital gains realised on the sale of shares in an overseas affiliate, dividends from an overseas affiliate, capital gains or rental income from overseas property, although they are more likely to own property through overseas subsidiaries. Most of these situations are likely to be isolated tax events where is quite clear how much has been paid and needs to be credited under a DTA. For example Thai company A sells a building in the the UK and pays capital gains tax on the gain. It also receives dividends from portfolio investments in the US. Withholding tax is likely to have been deducted from the US dividends and and UK capital gains tax (payable on UK property owned by offshore companies since 2016) has to be filed and paid before the normal tax year end AFAIK. So it is very clear how much overseas tax has already been paid in these too cases. Contrast someone with various sources of income from the UK, pensions,. rental income, dividends etc. They can show how much UK PIT they paid in the tax year but they can't show how much tax they paid on the individual income sources they might want to remit to Thailand because their income is taxed as a whole after deduction of allowances. So if that person remits his UK state pension only, the RD could argue that it wasn't taxed at all because the UK allowance was applied to it. I have a feeling the senior RD staff would want to do that in cases where someone doesn't remit their total annual foreign income in one Thai tax year. The RD could argue that you remit income against your allowances and lowest marginal rates of tax first to be taxed at your highest Thai marginal rates of tax. But how are individual RD officers in the sticks going to figure all this out when most of them have no knowledge of foreign tax codes or DTAs and can hardly write their own names in English and the RD is unwilling or unable to issue any regulations about it, while the Revenue Code doesn't even acknowledge the DTAs exist, let alone stipulate how they should be applied.

What the OP meant was that visa free travel to the Schengen area is on the Thai wish list but won't be granted by the EU. Just trying to get political credit for asking, then blame the EU for not agreeing to something the Thai side knew it was not going to get from the getgo. Germany used to allow 3 month visas to Thais prior to Schengen,, which kept the German bordellos stacked with Thai women, but the other EU countries would not allow this to continue. It would be great to get this but it is probably still decades away. EU countries have nothing much to gain - maybe 3 months transit visa to Thailand as opposed to 1 month, as Germans used to get.

Again! Baan Kruay was under water in the 2011 floods. Nothing done about flooding since then despite a huge emergency budget awarded to itself by the Yingluck government - probably safely in offshore accounts.

Can you cite any references for this this or is it just your own assumption?

After reading the OP I am none the wise as to what exactly happened.

Is there anything antisemitic on that placard? It contains some harsh accusations against Israeli government policies but there is nothing anti-Jewish there. Many Jewish people around the world have similar views about the Israeli government.

Thaksin has family reasons relating to his son for hating drugs of all types. He also found his war on drugs in the early 2,000s played well with the general public who liked the idea of alleged drug dealers being murdered indiscriminately in so called "silence killings" by other drug dealers, or so the narrative encouraged by him went. It was all smoke and mirrors because they only targeted small time dealers and consumers and left the big fish who were protected by police, army and politicians. So there was no improvement in the amphetamines situation. I don't know how popular he will be for doing this though. He is no longer viewed as a man of the people, more of a chancer who joined the elite that ousted him with nothing much to offer to the people this time once the digital wallet has been spent. Many Thais thought the medical marijuana thing was quite a good idea but were not happy that there was no regulation and that the attempt to pass a law to regulate it were blocked by the Democrat Party because they got worried that Anutin's BJP, an Isaan Party, was starting to campaign in their former stronghold of the South. Also a lot of people who voted MFP are resentful of Thaksin coming back without serving any time and jug and stealing the election that they won. MFP's policy was also to introduce a proper cannabis law.

Thaksin.

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.