Dogmatix

You are not required to file a tax return, if you are sure you have no assessable income. The RD reports that around 4 million pay income tax but they are receiving anout 10 million tax returns. The 6 million tax returns filed by people who didn’t have to pay tax must comprise largely people who had tax withheld by employers but need to reclaim it because with allowances they are under the threshold. Some may just file to be safe or because they got in the tax net and feel they have to keep filing. If you have dividends but no other income you can get back more tax than you actually had withheld from the dividends by filing a tax return. Many Thai investors who don’t work file for this reason. What do you get in return if you are a foreign tax payer in Thailand? Nothing. Social security is based on contributions and you can get those benefits, if you pay the contributions but don’t earn enough to pay tax like the migrant workers.

It’s a good question. Traditionally they rely on taxpayers who are not liable to salary withholding tax to declare themselves. Probably nothing will change for some years and then the RD might start negotiating with Immigration to cooperate on this.

The problem is that there has been no effort made by the RD or the government to think this through to see if it is even net beneficial to Thailand, let alone draft the hundreds of pages of regulations needed to cover the complex situations that will arise or even explain how to claim a tax credit when there is no space for this on the form. So it is not surprising that a great deal of angst, uncertainty and speculation has arisen. Probably many people will decide not to move to Thailand, leave Thailand and/or not invest in Thai property due to the uncertainties created, even though it might not turn out to be disadvantageous to them. That is a result of utter incompetence and idleness of the RD and government.

It is likely to affect all retirees. Definitely those who used the prior years loophole are affected but so are those who had all their income remitted direct to Thailand as soon as it arose without offshore seasoning. Most likely everyone is going to have to file a tax return. Some of those who remitted their income direct may have had a Thai tax liability but didn't file a tax return or pay the tax. However, we still don't know how the RD is going to treat income assessable in the country of origin which has a DTA with Thailand; allow deduction of tax credit but tax any differential is the Thai tax would be more; tax the whole lot and tell the taxpayer to claim a refund or claim a tax credit at home; or maybe even exempt and foreign income that is subject to tax overseas, no matter whether the tax is more or less than the Thai tax. Many decisions remain for the RD to make. So far they have just scrawled a few lines to reinterpret the tax law and left it at that which is unprofessional and irresponsible. But there again the top officials all live in huge mansions and drive fancy cars on their meagre civil service stipends. So it is reasonable to assume their working hours are occupied with something more pressing than drafting tedious tax regulations.

Would you take tax advice about being a Thai tax resident from someone who has a vested interest in persuading you to become a Thai tax resident?

The Prachachart article accurately predicted that the RD would issue an order to amend the first order by amnestying foreign source income generated prior to 2024. It also quoted an unnamed source saying they would amend the Revenue Code to introduce global taxation of all income for tax residents whether it is remitted to Thailand or not, as happens in many other countries. My point is that the Prachachart reporters were well informed. However, amending the Revenue Code is a large undertaking that needs to go through parliament.

Why isn't Srettha using his airmiles to flew to Qatar to negotiate the release of the Thais. It is hard to imagine they are of political value to Hamas but, sadly they are a low priority to Israel and the US which want to get their own citizens out first. I also can't understand why Hamas had to murder Thais who were just trying to earn money to support their families and have no special loyalty to Israel or its apartheid system.

This is also what it sounded like to me. In other words a reversion to the status quo before legalization but without recriminalization. In this case the shops would have to close as they would have no products to sell. Herbal clinics would continue to prescribe oils in extremely low concentrations at high prices and with high prescription costs. The buds market would go underground but would be quite large, if possession is still illegal. Even in the UK you can get buds from private clinics. It seems medical will not thrive without them. Although Anutin and BJP try to distance themselves from recreational use, the party owner's daughter has a big plantation in Buriram and she told the BBC that recreational use was where the real money is and was the real intent of BJP's legalization. So I imagine Anutin is putting pressure on PT not to recriminalize and to allow the buds trade to continue in some shape or form. But right now he is happy drawing up lists of gangsters and writing new history textbooks to make Thai kids into loyal citizens instead of freethinking pot smokers.

It's lucky you have a choice not to use it. I have noticed very little cannabis fumes on the streets I walk on in Thailand.

I have gun permits too but like your relatives permits they are the common or garden Por 4 permits "to have and to use" of which there are around 6 million in Thailand. Under the current law these are lifetime permits but they don't permit the holder to carry loaded guns around. You can keep at home for self protection and take to the range unloaded in a locked box in your car boot for practice or sport. Anutin is not talking about Por 4 permits which are still being issued, although they have been making it hard or impossible to those with 5 more guns to apply since before the Paragon shooting,. He is talking about Por 12 carry permits which allow holders to carry a designated loaded, concealed handgun in public which is clear from the OP article. Holders need a Por 4 permit to apply for a Por 12. The Por is valid for a year at a time. If it is not renewed, the holder is not disarmed but keeps the gun and Por 4 permit.

Everything still up in the air and no one can say where it will land. But the latest from the Public Health Minister was that they are reviewing the last govt's failed Cannabis and Hemp Bill with a view to amending that. He said confusingly that cannabis will NOT be recriminalised and shops will be able to continue but they will not be able to sell dried flower, so it was not very clear how they could make money - selling CBD oil perhaps. Perhaps there will be a system for medical prescriptions of THC oil or even buds and they might decide to recriminalise anyway, while working on the bill which could take a year or two. I think Srettha said recriminalization would happen 6 months after he took office. He seems to be digging himself into deep holes with his digital wallet and alleged bribes for police promotions and his popularity in the toilet that he might not be around to see this through. Since the health minister is trying to amend the law to allow people caught with up to 5 speed pills to face rehab instead of prosecution, a complete reversion to the pre-June 2022 status quo for weed would be inconsistent. Hopefully it with remain decriminalized or at least there will be a similar exemption for personal use below a certain amount. Having encouraged Thais to go their own weed and shops to open to sell weed with hardly any restrictions, there is now a healthy above board distribution system and it would be insane to try to reverse everything and force it all back underground. But this government has already demonstrated that it doesn't have the ability to think things through.

Can you clarify this? Do you mean remit rental payments (and school fees and the like) to the Thai service providers direct from offshore? I am pretty sure, the RD would deem this as as assessable income to your account, if they became aware of it, which seems possible, if they are going to track all foreign remittances over a certain amount. It is already clear in the Revenue Code that company payments of similar benefits direct to service providers on behalf of employees is assessable income for the employees. It doesn't seem much different. I think that gifting is a better loophole if you have a spouse or partner, i.e. gift the money for these payments to a spouse or partner and let them pay.

Simple answer. Yes.

This woman's crooked grin is too much for me along with the conflict of interest inherent in her providing tax advise to persuade people to buy the cards, while working for an agent that makes its living from selling Thai Elite/Privilege cards.

Mazars observation "The Revenue Department appears to be aware of the challenges encountered by taxpayers from the new protocol concerning foreign-sourced income. DI Paw. 162 resolves the difficulties taxpayers may have in distinguishing assessable income and savings incurred in years before 1 January 2024. Taxpayers with foreign-sourced income, which has yet to be realised, should consider realising income or gains before the end of this year so that such foreign-sourced income will not be taxable if remitted into Thailand on or after 1 January 2024" That's a very polite way of putting it. More realistically the director general of of the RD issued the first order impulsively without thinking it through, with no idea of how much incremental tax it would raise, if any, certainly no concern about potential impacts on the Thai economy, condo developers, or any details of how it would be applied vis a vis DTAs or anything much else. He was just told by underlings it was a good idea because CRS reporting will help them catch out cheaters. Instead of passing it by the RD lawyers beforehand I guess the legal department only found out about it from the press and have spent the last couple of months giving it the once over. One very obvious conclusion must have been that the impossibility of setting any fair guidelines for determining what constituted capital and what constituted income going back decades in some cases would probably have resulted in a plethora of cases in the Central Tax Court which the RD could very well have lost. This is in addition to the fact that no legislative support has been forthcoming from the finance ministry under Srettha as finance minister, who has probably only set foot in the building to pray at the spirit house and is just leaving everything to the bureaucrats like the RD director general with zero ministerial input or oversight. This means that the new interpretation will start life on 1 Man 2024 as a mere instruction to RD staff that is not binding on taxpayers. The risk remains that wealthy taxpayers will refuse to accept the unlawful reinterpretation and sue in the Tax Court even with the pre 2024 amnesty. The fact that this new interpretation is totally inconsistent with PT's previous policy of regional tax competitiveness under Yingluck doesn't even seem to have registered while PT is so busy trying to dig itself out of its digital vote buying pledge. The Yingluck government did a good job in making Thai corporate income tax competitive with HK and Singapore by reducing it from 30% 20%. So why ruin that by making it unattractive for anyone to come and work, retire or invest as an individual in Thailand? If regional taxation competitiveness, is no longer a policy of PT, why not go the whole hog and raise corporate income tax back up to 30%? While this new remittance tax for individuals may only raise 10s of billions in incremental tax, if that, raising corporate income tax back to 30% would raise an incremental 300 billion, 60% of what they estimate is needed for the digital wallet, without any negative effect on the poor like an increase in VAT which is no doubt in Thailand's not too distant future. The Prachachart Thurakit article suggested that amnestying pre 2024 income was just a stop gap and that legislation is planned to amend the Revenue Code to introduce global taxation of income whether remitted to Thailand or not. I would guess that PT finance functionaries, while not busy thinking up schemes to renege on the digital wallet and blame that on someone else, are probably thinking they can kick this can down the road. Since they have left it all to the RD without the party taking full ownership of the policy, they keep their options open to either provide supporting legislation to amend the Revenue Code via a Royal Decree or even a parliamentary bill or to ditch the whole thing, if it proves too troublesome and blame it on the Revenue Department for failing to take into account the impacts on the Thai economy in the same way as they scrapped the transactional tax on SET stock trades and blamed the Finance Ministry for failing to understand the negative implications for market volumes. If it is successfully challenged in the Tax Court, they will be forced to take a stand but this government will probably be gone before that happens. I guess the RD will just leave it like this for now, since the orginal order came from the top of the RD and their lawyers have now had time to think about it and Order P 162/2566 was all that resulted from this process, welcome though that was. Other details like how to apply tax credits will be filled in later, possibly after problems become apparent following the submission of 2024 tax returns which will only be the tip of the iceberg since prior year income for 2024 will now no longer be a thorny issue. While the UK HMRC has pages and pages of guidelines on taxation of remitted foreign source income for its non-doms, Thailand's RD is happy to introduce a similar tax with a 50 word instruction to staff that is not binding on taxpayers and wait and see where the gremlins appear. Spot the Mickey Mouse tax authority,

Indeed. The first prediction in the artilce this that the RD would amnesty income generated before 2024 has already come to pass.

Worth bearing in mind that she is an agent selling Thai Privilege memberships on commission. That's why she is smiling so much.

Interesting that the police will not be involved in any of this. I wonder if Chada and any of his family, such as his son in law, a mayor who was just arrested for extortion, are on any of these lists. It all sounds like a nice little earner. You are on the red list and the DOPA SWAT team is coming for you next Tuesday. Let's play high stakes golf for a few million a hole and I promise you my golf is really bad.

A Thai friend who is a shooting enthusiast looked into this when Anutin first announced he planned to do this several weeks ago. He believes Anutin can only stop provincial governors from issuing Por 12 carry licences that are valid in their own provinces only. The police chief approves the Bkk and nationwide permits and the Council of State has already ruled that the Interior Ministry has no right to interfere with this when the Interior Ministry under the Yingluck government tried to block the issue of carry permits approved by the police chief. There are only around 1,000 nationwide carry permits and nearly all are issued to MPs, senators, judges and the like with less than around 50 in the hands of very wealthy businessmen. The MPs, senators and privy councillors will quickly make a big fuss, if their annual permits cannot be renewed. I don't think provincial carry permits have been issued in recent years. Certainly none for Bkk only and I don't think the elected governor has that authority anyway. I believe provincial governors have not wanted to take the risk of issuing permits in case a crime is committed by some one approved by then and there is high risk provincial permit holders will violate their licences and carry their guns over provincial boundaries. If someone thinks he is important enough to get one, he can be told to apply to the national police chief for a more useful nationwide permit. Imagine having a permit for Samut Prakan or somewhere and you gun becomes illegal each time you cross a provincial boundary. At first he said he would change the law to discontinue carry permits completely but asking MPs, who are probably the largest single group of civilian legal concealed gun carriers, to vote for it would be like asking turkeys to vote for Christmas. It is notable that these news from the Interior Ministry was not accompanied by any statistics regarding the number of carry permits in issue and the types of people they are issued to. Without any analysis of that type it sounds as if significant steps are being taken to reduce the number of guns legally on the streets but the reality is that it will take a very small number of guns out of the hands of a few senior members of society, assuming they don't just continue to carry their guns anyway in the knowledge that no cop would dare arrest them. Meanwhile a large number of the estimated 4 million unregistered guns will continue to be carried around by their owners.

She can also check in at the Police General Hospital and catch up her cosmetic surgery at taxpayer expense for a few months while waiting for release. The last time I saw her she looked very good for her age but a wee bit flat chested. The photograph above suggests the need for a light face lift.

'...Srettha is definitely obliged to return favours to Yingluck..." When Yingluck was PM there were a lot of rumours in the press about favours Srettha allegedly received from Yingluck. I wonder if he is still anxious to receive more of them over 10 years later.

He is just a grinning Cheshire cat nominee for the person who stole the election.

If it was a blank gun and not modified to fire real bullets, there is no law against them yet as far as I know, even though the Interior Ministry has been seizing them and asking owners to register them since the Paragon murders by the 14 year old fruit cake. It takes some time to amend laws in Thailand. They need draft a bill first which needs to pass three readings in parliament and then usually comes into effect 90 days after publication in the Royal Gazette.

Like many aspects of Thai tax this is fairly opaque. I believe "commercial or profitable manner" wording is to distinguish from property acquired through inheritance or not for profit which is exempt. I have no idea how property qualifies as acquired not for profit in addition to inherited property. I would suggest that this category is probably redundant. Property sales are taxed at source at the Land Office and, similarly to tax withheld from dividends, there is no need to declare sales on the tax return form, if tax withheld was correct. I think the reason to declare property sales is in the case of the land sale involving Sansiri that was flagged by Chuvit. In that case the sellers owned the land jointly and broke up the sale into a number of transactions of several days with the Land Department charging the regular withholding tax applicable to individuals. However, corporations have to pay normal corporate income tax and partnerships have to pay tax at the normal income tax progressive rates after deduction of allowable expenses for which there is a space on the form. In the Sansiri case, Chuvit argued that the Revenue Code regarded joint sellers as a partnership and therefore they should have have paid at the top progressive rate of 35% on the gains instead of getting away with the withholding tax which would have been less than 5% of the sales value. So if you are filing a PND 90 as a partnership, you should declare gains on property sales and claim expenses there. Income tax paid withheld at the Land Dept should be entered under the tax paid section. Thus, if you have a substantial gain like the sellers in the Sansiri case, you will have to pay more tax and vice versa, if you had a small gain or a loss. Normal individuals don't have to fill in this section in respect of sales of Thai property because the withholding tax at the Land Office is final for them.

I am curious as to how the exclusion of 6 million people works. Less than 4 million pay income tax which starts at 25k per month net of basic deductions. So excluding everyone in the tax net is still short by over 2 million people. So they must be confident there are several million people with extremely low incomes who have over 500,000 in the bank. If this is really true, they should investigate all of them for income tax evasion.