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Dogmatix

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Everything posted by Dogmatix

  1. Well. As Mike Lister correctly, says they wouldn't know and don't want to lose face. Remember the fanfare announcement of the Phuket sandbox for returnees to Thailand during COVID. Thai embassies and consulates around the world were still saying they hadn't received information on how to process applications a week or two after the government announced the start date for applications.
  2. I knew a guy who took tours to West Africa and other places a couple of decades ago. In the Gambia he warned the tourists no to go outside the guarded beach resort on their own. There were always several single middle aged European ladies in the tours to Gambia. One of them, a Swiss lady, ignored the warning and wandered out to explore the world outside the resort. She didn't get more than 500 metres before a guy popped up and raped her by the side of the road. She came back bleeding with ripped clothing. My friend took her to the local police station which refused to accept the complaint, arguing that she must have been looking for bumsters and got want she wanted. The victim was quite tough and recovered her composure enough to join in with the rest of the group on meals and tours after two days in her room. Not sure, if she was really interested in bumsters or just going for a stroll but she showed no interest in Gambian men after that. Apart from the rape to be fair the bumster scene seems no different from the bar girl and bar boy scene in Pattaya, except it is limited to young local men and middle aged farang women. Pattaya is more diversified and caters to every taste.
  3. If you didn't make misleading assertions about Thai tax revenue breakdowns that are so far from what the actual data shows, I wouldn't point out your errors.
  4. Some random thoughts. It terms of tracking remittances the RD could either do nothing, at least to start with, and rely self assessment or it could follow up on every remittance in to the banking system which would entail a lot of time and trouble and false leads. If they do track remittances which seems likely at some point, it would make more sense to set a minimum amount to avoid bothering with all the many small remittances. An easy way to do this would be set the limit at US$50k which is it the level at which remittances have to be reported to the Bank of Thailand by banks with a declaration from the recipient on the intended use of funds. Piggy backing on the system already in place would save a lot of extra work for banks but the RD might decide it doesn't care about extra work and set a lower limit. All Thais are likely to be tax residents but with foreigners they will get a lot of people who are not tax residents, if they set a limit that is too low. As far as gifts are concerned it has been advised to put "gift" on the remittance advice but I am pretty sure there is no gift category when the recipient has to declare the purpose of the remittance to the Bank of Thailand, if over US$50k. In this case the recipient should probably tell the BOT it is for living expenses.
  5. No, you are still wrong even in your revised statement on both counts. PIT rose every year from 2001 to 2019 except 2009 (caused by the subprime global recession) and was 9% of total tax revenue in 2021, not 2%. Look again. PIT is 4th line down item "1100 of individuals". https://stats.oecd.org/Index.aspx?DataSetCode=REVTHA
  6. From a paid servant of Thaksin who is actually the most divisive character in Thai politics in the last 30 years. How many people have been killed or committed suicide because of him and his nominee sister?
  7. No it happens quite often in the LOS. A woman was killed when a power line fell down on her riding her motorbike a couple of years back. Never heard of accidents like that in the West.
  8. You have to remember that this was not a holistic tax reform by the government involving legislation. It was simply the director-general of the RD deciding unilaterally that a clause in the Revenue Code will mean something different from what it was ruled to mean 38 years ago. Srettha ordered the RD around the same time to prepared draft amendments to toughen up the gift tax section of the Revenue Code and the Inheritance Tax Act to collect more tax and the RD said it had already done that but no details have been leaked. The wording on gifts is quite clear and the director-general obviously didn't see any scope for tweaking it to mean something difference with a malevolent stroke of his pen. If it is going to be done, it will need legislation in parliament.
  9. The statistics tell a different story. https://stats.oecd.org/Index.aspx?DataSetCode=REVTHA. Direct taxes rose nearly every year from 2001 till 2019. In fact personal income tax rose every year in that period except 2009 due to the 2008 subprime recession year. Direct taxes accounted for 29%of government revenue in 2021, not 2%. It is great that you are proud of your wife's small business and minimal tax payments which you mention with great frequency. But the standard deduction of 60% is not really over generous for a business. That assumes a pre-tax profit margin of 40% which is far, far less than the average pre-tax margin of companies listed on the SET. Combined with personal allowances a 60% expenses deduction is advantageous for a small enough business but for a significantly larger business such a small deduction would result in a crippling tax bill. That is why businesses of any size will incorporate and submit audited financial statements showing their actual costs and benefit from lower corporate income tax rates.
  10. These are interesting questions. There is definitely pressure to increase tax revenues which have been sliding backwards since COVID and Thailand's tax base is too long to pay for the type of welfare that voters are starting to expect - MFP promised an old age allowance of 3,000 baht a month, after the Prayut government stopped the old age allowance of 600 for new oldies and there is a group pressuring the current government to go through with that. MFP planned to increase VAT, introduce a wealth tax plus some other measures to pay for this. So definitely the government would like to see this remittance tax generate incremental revenue. There are no international regulations requiring this type of remittance tax. In Thailand's case the international pressure was to join CRS reporting which they did in March 2023. The RD twisted this round to sound like the pressure was to tax remittances, whereas the truth was that the RD felt that CRS would give them information about overseas bank accounts of tax residents that would make it easier for them to investigate foreign source income that might be remitted. The fact that the international pressure was non-existent and that they need to increase tax revenues doesn't necessarily mean that their will be draconian investigations of remittances but it might. I guess we'll find out soon enough.
  11. New expats will be effectively limited to arriving after 1 July and buying their condo before the end of December that year. No need to think about moving and buying another condo, if you are retired and need to import the money. When selling to another foreigner find another new expat who has arrived after 1 July and is ready to buy before the year end. This a brilliant scheme to encourage expats to move to Thailand and buy condos. Countries like the Philippines and Malaysia will be kicking themselves for not having thought of it.
  12. But the junta is part of the government.
  13. I did a usufruct on house and land in Bkk. It depends on the Land Office whether they will play ball. Some object to foreigners getting a usufruct from any Thai, including their wives or they might just make a fuss to get a bribe. In Bangkok it wasn’t too difficult but we had to be interviewed by the head or deputy head of registrations who said something like he knew the farang had paid for the land. The benefit of having any encumbrance registered on the chanote is that it makes impossible to mortgage or sell the land. It is not too expensive and does offer you some protection.
  14. If we take the RD at its word, the reinterpretation is only a stopgap while they get the govt to amend the RC to provide for global taxation for tax residents, regardless of whether income is remitted or not. That would most likely remove the remittance tax element but require declaration of all income earned anywhere. In that case income earned before global taxation starts could probably be remitted tax free. But who can say what will really happen in this country where things are done on a whim with thinking them through.
  15. I have been busy created transactions by selling shares and funds prior to the year end. Hopefully that will create a pool of funds generated from pre-2024 transactions that can be remitted tax free in future. But it is anyone's guess how they will implement this..
  16. A lot of this stuff on DTAs is not even fixed between developed countries. For example when my father died UK domiciled but owning a house in Spain, we were advised that the UK had a right to charge inheritance tax on the Spanish assets but that HMRC would allow the Spanish to tax assets situated in Spain and the UK would forego its right to tax them. This was advantageous to us because Spain charges inheritance tax to the inheritors individually and has lower rates for property going to direct descendants, like Thailand does, rather than to the undistributed estate as the UK does. HMRC didn't exercise its right to charge the difference, even though UK IHT would have been more. Thailand is starting from scratch with no tacit understandings with other countries on how to implement DTAs and no clue how to do things or how they work internationally. Also they don't give a monkeys what damage they inflict on taxpayers or the Thai economy. They just want to do what they want to do and to hell with the consequences. A spit the dummy outlook.
  17. It was Thaksin's intention to install light weight Srettha to prepare the way for Ung Ing. He didn't even allow Srettha to be an MP for chrissakes and he has no faction of his own in the party. It is working out fine. Srettha is just a clown who does as he is told and racks up airmiles set up to sell land bridges that are known to be unviable but generate consulting fees for cronies. When Srettha's credibility is at a low enough ebb, Thaksin will push him aside, blame him for all that has gone wrong and usher in the airhead Ung Ing as PM while he controls everything from behind her.
  18. It would make sense for them to give exemption for money remitted by foreigners to buy a condo that would have to be kept for, say, 5 years. But strangely there has been no fuss made by condo developers. Just silly articles saying things like sales of resort condos to foreigner to soar in 2024, as if the writers are living under a stone.
  19. Actually the government under Prayut starting telling Thais they wanted them to file tax returns whether they had suffiicient assessable income or not, saying it would help create a system for reverse taxation, i.e. paying money to people whose declared income is below a threshold, even though there is no sign of negative taxation. Not sure, if they really want tax returns from foreigners below the tax threshold though. They certainly won't pay them, if their income is low.
  20. tiresome to keep seeing these shameless lies about Thaksin from everyone from the prime minister down. How do they expect Thai people to believe anything else they say?
  21. When I first came to Thailand I had a Thai teacher who was quite pretty and very friendly, who told me she was a Muslim from the South. After a few weeks of weekly lessons, she hinted strongly she would like to go on a date with me to the movies or something. She had already told me she had trouble finding a boyfriend because he would have to convert to Islam, if they got married, which would, of course, involve an operation for some. Fortunately, there were many more fish in the Thai ocean.
  22. Can't complain about rounded up, if you overstay your visa, specially if your behaviour annoys others, so they report you to the cops. But it is not really very exciting national news.
  23. They keep going on about tourism recovery but we couldn't care less. If you do your promotions and offer visa free travel, there is nothing much more to do about it. Just wait and see. It depends on the economies of the countries of origin, especially China. Far better to worry about things you can change, like upgrading Thailand's appalling public education to facilitate more foreign investment and ability to speak English and work in higher value added businesses.
  24. Let him take a few months off and give everyone a break from his PR photo opportunities around the world and save the taxpayer some travel costs. He can't do anything at home because he would tread on toes and he has no faction of his own at PT to protect him and is not even an MP because Thaksin refused to put him on the party list. Flying to Japan to sell a completely unviable land bridge to Japanese, who know perfectly the Thai government has an appalling track record of ripping off foreign infrastructure investors and refusing to honour international arbitration, was a complete waste of time. The only thing junk projects like that generate is fat consulting contracts for PT cronies from commission can be kicked back.
  25. An air ticket going overseas purchased from an overseas airline website would be more difficult to trace. Agreed. if remitting fees to a Thai school from investments held overseas prior to 2024, I guess the investments may have to sold and realised to show income realised before 2024. but no one really knows the answer to such questions. If you have a child at private school in Thailand and you are also living with a wife, remittance of gift to spouse might be a good way to handle school fees.
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