Dogmatix

They point out that 3 out 4 workers fall outside the personal income tax system, as only 10.8 million filed tax return forms out of a workforce of 40 million. AFAIK it is considerably worse than that, as the last number of reported income tax payers was only 3.3 million. I believe the explanation for the variance is the salary withholding tax system. Employers have to deduct tax based on the basic personal allowances and on the assumption the employee will remain in employment for the whole year earning the same wage. That appears to mean that most of the people filing tax returns are applying for tax refunds. If you were just over the minimum salary to have withholding tax deducted but had a number of additional allowances like for parents and kids, you need to file a tax return to get a refund of the tax withheld. Similarly if you worked for for the first six months of the tax year, then became unemployed for the rest of the year, your withholding tax will be way too much. The main problem is that Thai wages are extremely low and probably only about 1 million earn more than 50k a month. That means that one of the suggested solutions of toughening up the progressive rates (which were up to 60% in the late 80s) will be ineffective in raising significantly more revenue, since the number of people declaring over 5 million a year must be tiny. However, increasing the top rate to more than 35% would make the reinterpretation more odious than it is already. Longer term they have to improve competitiveness and productivity, which have long been eroded by incompetent and corrupt governments ignoring key contributors like education, and get GDP per capita up significantly. Short term the are going to have to raise VAT.

I was flying into Bangkok from overseas somewhere some years ago and there was a well dressed African guy sitting next to me who asked me to help fill in his landing card. He could only speak French and his passport only had the year in it like the OP's wife. He asked me how to fill in his DOB. So I said, if you only have the year, fill that in and he did. He explained his situation was similar to the OP's wife. He was born in a village and his birth was registered retrospectively and no one remembered his birth date. I guess no problem landing in Thailand, as there are many similar cases, including hill tribe villages where government officials assigned everyone a birth date of 1 January. Lucky he wasn't going to an anally retentive country like Australia.

You must be a handsome old dog!

I wonder if a Thai court would convict for this. The defence will be saying what a slut she was taking a complete stranger she met on Tinder back to her condo which may only have one room at 2.00 am after having drinks with him. What she claims she told him she wouldn't have sex with him as she had to work in the morning which implied she wanted to have sex with him on a future occasion and probably wouldn't mind, if they did it then anyway. It was already 2.00 am. So she should have just told him she couldn't take him back because she had to work in the working. Call me for the return match when I don't have to work in the morning. Goodnight. If the guy says it was consentful or that he didn't do anything, the court may believe him. It is also possible that she asked him for money to help pay the rent or something and he did a wham bam and thank you mam. If she has a job in Thailand, I sure hope it isn't teaching young children.

One would think that in the interests of investment in the Thai economy, they might want to give an exempt for remittance of capital that is invested in property, stocks or bonds and held for at least 5 years or something. But they are probably too bone headed to think of that.

I doubt it. The exemption given to LTR visa holders was from the last government and was probably only approved because they didn't think they were giving much away, given that wealthy LTR holders could be assumed to be not living from hand to mouth and could remit only previous year income. So it was probably though of as just a convenience to LTR visa holders, not having to wait to remit their income.

Interesting that they decided to exempt some types of investment income but not others. Anyway a Royal Decree is not an Act of Parliament. All that is needed to amend or cancel a Royal Decree is another Royal Decree.

This comment from "The Legal" fails to properly attribute the source it extracted this information from. I suspect it is the original Q&A from the RD which said this announcement is not lawful but you should follow it anyway and gave very little clarification beyond that paradoxical statement. You can get a much better idea from a google translation of the complete original than from the selective commentary of "The Legal" whoever that may be. RD Order 161 2566 Q&A TH.pdf

But only 3.3 million out of 70 million Thais pay income tax. Granted all pay VAT but many foreign tourists pay more VAT during their trips than the average Thai does in a year. The taxation argument doesn't hold water.

This was a rather pointless video. Just saying that paying Thai tax on only $100,000 out of your income of $1 million is a good deal because it is only an effective tax rate of 2% is not helpful to most people here, who actually live in Thailand and don't have $1 million a year. I wasted over 10 minutes watching this garbage to see, if he had anything useful to say to but he didn't.

I have a Danish friend on Danish government pension who also received a similar summons from the RD but they asked him to bring all documentation relating to his pension and tax paid on it. Perhaps they made a reciprocal agreement with the Danes on this or the Danes just volunteered stuff on their citizens in Thailand out of sheer bloody mindedness. I wonder, if this signifies the future. Anyone who received foreign remittances will get called in and they will have print outs of CRS reports on all their foreign bank accounts to cross reference with what the tax resident shows them.

There is a difference between this P. directive to RD staff and proposed laws. The plan to introduce a new transactional tax of Thai stock trades was a proposed law that got trashed by the new government a few weeks ago, blaming the Finance Ministry for not understanding the potential damage to the stock market. Of course something similar could happen with the RD blamed by the government. However, the RD has ordered staff to go ahead with this new interpretation and, if nothing else happens, that is what they will do.

This is quite scary. I wonder why you had to pay a fine at the amphur, rather than the RD office. I was fined and made to pay some back tax and income for my company due to a small mistake made by our accountant a few years earlier but I had to pay at the RD office.

Although I hope that they will just pull the plug on this or defer it before due date, the clock is now ticking and there has not even been any sign of the focus groups promised by the RD spokesman to assess the expected impacts on the economy. You would think people at the top of the RD and the Finance Ministry had some common sense and would want to avoid a chaotic situation and huge disincentive to capital inflows by individual investors but this is not necessarily the case. They are probably thinking that by remaining silent the country will benefit from large remittances before the year end and then they can think about whether to clarify rules regarding DTAs etc or even dump it or delay it, or the Finance Ministry might decide to do something. It is also possible that no one will do anything even before 2024 tax returns are due and leave it as a chaotic situation with of loads of expats and Thais not knowing what they should do. That could, indeed, be left to drag on for a couple of years, given the spectacular incompetence of many Thai bureaucrats and politicians. It is quite clear that implementing the reinterpretation, as is, will not be beneficial to the Thai economy and will also be unfair vis a vis domestic taxation. Bringing taxes on foreign source income in line with domestic taxation would definitely require some proper legislation. For example capital gains on equities should be exempted and dividends taxed at a flat rate of 10%, while tax on property sales should be a transactional tax, not a capital gains tax. While they are at it, it might be a good idea to actually legislate that DTAs apply to individuals' income because that is not in the Revenue Code. The DTAs exist in a vacuum as far as individuals are concerned. Although it can be argued that international treaties take precedence over Thai statutory law, Thai courts will not necessarily agree with that in all cases. Thus Thai statutory law should specify that international treaties are applicable, as is the case in the Land Code. There are a couple of rulings that imply that DTAs are applicable for individual taxpayers but this could be reinterpreted by another P. order like P. 161/2566.

That is technically correct but the RD's wishy washyQ&A piece soon after the announcement admitted that it was not a law but said that it is a directive to tax officials on how to reinterpret the law and advise tax payers. Then it said taxpayers had a duty to follow the law, implying that they have to comply with this half baked legal reinterpretation. The problem is that the RD can be vindictive and authoritarian and, if taxpayers are targeted by them, their recourse is to sue in the Central Tax Court which may not be realistic for many and normally takes years. QUESTION #11 Is Revenue Department Order No. P.161/2023 a Law or not? Are taxpayers under a legal obligation to comply with this order or not. ANSWER: It is not a law. It is an order explaining the meaning of the Revenue Code Section 41 paragraph 2. Taxpayers have a duty to comply with the law in paying taxes. Thus the this type P. administrative order from the director-general of the Revenue Department is considered a guideline for Revenue Department staff to follow in order for them to provide advice to taxpayers, so they may follow the law correctly. RD Order 161 2566 Q&A TH.pdf

The article by Prof Kittipong that the OP Thai Examiner article is based on was published in Thai Krungthep Thurakit on 29 September 2023 https://www.bangkokbiznews.com/finance/investment/1091100# . The Examiner quotes and paraphrases from it extensively. The Examiner article is well written but I find it misleading that the author didn't fully attribute his source as being the 29 September KT article. I searched in English and in Thai and Prof Kittipong has not published anything publicly on the topic since 29 September and, since the article was published there has been no response from the Revenue Department or the Ministry of Finance. So I think the Examiner, by rehashing an old article without attributing the original publication or the date of it, has provided some false hope to English speakers that it was a new article from Prof Kittipong that might generate some reaction from the RD which is clearly not the case.

Wasn't one of Rama V's wives allowed to drown by onlookers because anyone who touched a queen would be executed?

The report said he was concerned that Madame Danny's nephew had been injured, although there was apparently no sign of the boy. Personally I would have tried to find out what happened to the boy and not bothered with the pick-up driver, other than to photograph the licence plate as it left, in case there was a hit and run.

Madame Danny shrieking does sound a bit like a retired beer bar worker. The pick-up driver should be charged with assault anyway. She must have got the registration number while she was busy filming Monsieur Danny being beaten up.

He is a stooge for PT which joined an unholy alliance with the military to seize the election from the winner and install this government filled with unsavory characters. ISOC is a left over from the Cold War when it was founded as a communist suppression under.

They know exactly the opposite will happen.

Bar fines will have to go up and Cheap Charlies who don't want to pay will have to wait till 4.00 a.m. It will be good for the drug dealers too, as bar workers will need to buy more speed pills to get them through their shifts.

Good point. Only 4% of Thailand's population pays income tax which starts at 25k per month after basic deductions. So Thailand has only a tiny middle class of probably around 1 or 2%. You can't really be classified as middle class if you are too poor to pay income tax. Most of the population are poor and deeply indebted with household debt over 90% of GDP. Then there is 1-2% who get by more or less OK. then there are about a million who well off and a fraction of those are mega wealthy. I can't imagine that India has a better distribution of income. So I would go for about 1-2% of them being middle class maybe earning US$5,000 a year plus.

You jest but they have no acceptable way to means test the tens of millions of Thais who would apply for it, if they have to exclude people. Only 3 million pay tax. You can start off by excluding all of them but tax after basic deductions starts at 25k a month which doesn't make you a rich person and is only the minimum wage promised by PT for college grads. So they will have to go much lower than that, if they want to get it down from 56 million people to 40 million as they said recently. Means testing for the Prayut government's hand outs for those with income of less than 8,333 a month has been horrific. They have to apply to BAAC Bank which had strict instructions to cut out as many as possible through interviews. This year they managed to cut out 5 million applicants and approved 14.6 million out of 19.6 people who applied. The decisions have been arbitrary, often based on information given by village headmen or similar who told them stories about people they disliked having children living overseas or married to farangs. My mother in law applied and got it the first year but the second year they were told to exclude more people and she was told by some youngish Thai chinese bank officer from another province that her financial situation was "comfortable" according their information which she refused to disclose and excluded her. Many of her friends had similar experiences, including some who really didn't have any support from family. It is hard to imagine that means testing of this type would ingratiate PT to the electorate but let's see them try it.

What would happen is that they would issue domestic bonds to cover say 200 million of it. That is equivalent to 1% of GDP and would drain liquidity from the domestic banking system which only pays 0.5% on deposits, unchanged despite several interest rate hikes. Depositors would scramble to get the government bonds that would pay a lot more than 0.5% and actually less risk than bank deposits which now have only limited deposit insurance. That would drain domestic liquidity and put upward pressure on interest rates. Thailand's sovereign rating would probably be adjusted down, increasing the cost of borrowing offshore by the government and corporates. This would offset some of the stimulus effect which is likely to have a multiplier effect of less than 1x in an economy of this type, vs the finance ministry's heroic assumption of 3x. The ministry is relying on this projection to say the scam will be partly self funding through incremental VAT receipts in light of its huge multiplier assumption. The failure of this projection would lead to a shortfall of funding and greater unplanned deficit. Yes, there would also be an inflationary effect which would reduce real GDP growth generated adjusted for inflation. It looks like a freight train slowing chugging towards a concrete wall. From a macro perspective borrowing money to create a multiplier of less than one is like burning money, as you are borrowing 100 baht to generate 70 baht of incremental GDP.