Dogmatix

Drug dealers, junta family members etc.

Re the LTR visas. These are pretty good way for those can afford them to come to Thailand and the tax exemption looks pretty good, even if it is only for prior year income. However, nothing is set in stone in Thailand, particularly regarding foreigners. A government that decides to tax poor foreigners but exempt rich foreigners in the interests of fairness and equality is vulnerable to attack by opposition politicians. The terms of various editions of the Elite card have changed many times. The original card was only a million, I seem to recall, and provided the right to own land which was axed within a few months before anyone had attempted to exercise it. The LTR visas are valid for 10 years but since the Immigration Act only allows a maximum of a 2 year visa, the BOI has to use roll overs to camouflage this reality, since amending the Immigration Act is not something any government seems to ever want to do, as they can just issue a patch work of ever changing National Police Orders to fill in the details instead without undergoing parliamentary scrutiny. I guess no government will try any funny business in the first 10 years but after that no one can guarantee what renewal terms will look like, specially if some LTR visa holders are accused of money laundering and other crimes.

The condo developers have been surprisingly silent. As you say the Chinese money laundering crowd were the main game for developers pre-COVID but are slow to return. Expats who live in Thailand are a more steady market for condos and retirees tend to buy in resort areas where there are few Thai buyers. They are effectively shut out of the market from 1 Jan. People who move to Thailand, buy immediately and stay over 180 days in their first tax year will get nailed too, in many cases without realising it until a deputation of RD people show up at their nice new condo. Very easy for RD to track since foreign buyers need in most cases need to show they have remitted the entire purchase price to Thailand. Who will accept remitted 20 mil to buy their dream retirement condo in Phuket and finding that after accruing for tax, they have only 13.6m left to pay for the condo? Another aspect is expat retirees who already have funds in Thailand earning the paltry 0.5% interest to live on for many years or will remit them before 1 Jan. I was talking to a friend in this situation who accumulated savings from many years working in the Kingdom before retiring. He was looking at buying piece of land in Chiang Mai and building his dream house there. However, he wants to keep his options open to return to his home country for healthcare reasons and doesn't want to import his entire savings pot to Thailand to earn 0.5% interest and maybe have difficulties sending it out again in future. So he has shelved his plan to buy property in Thailand permanently because it would have eaten into the pot of money he already has in Thailand and could make him have to remit cash from overseas and pay tax earlier. I guess many expats are having similar thoughts about shelving plans to buy property in Thailand, even if they are in a position to get the money in before Jan or already have the funds in Thailand. One never knows what they might come up with next and the idea of RD staff coming and knocking on foreigners doors is not appealing.

If you refer to the Thai text of Section 41 of the Revenue Code, you will see that it uses the expression มีเงินได้ which means literally receive money. That is a much broader definition that "earn" and could complicate this approach.

My initial thought was also that the BOI was prescient in providing the exemption from tax on foreign sourced income and could have had an inking that something like this might happen. But when you look at the wording of the Royal Decree it seems that this may not have really been the case. They seem to have intended to carve out an exemption from the original interpretation only in that they gave exemption from tax on prior year foreign source income remitted to Thailand only, which was all that is taxable under the current interpretation. Had they had full prescience they would have provided exemption for foreign source income earned in any year in the past and remitted to Thailand. The Royal Decree potentially exposes LTRs to random visits from RD officials with outstretched hands examining bank remittances and making the owner prove it was income earned only in the prior tax year and not in years earlier than that which are assessable under the Royal Decree combined with the reinterpretation.

I feel that looking at gifts is a dead end, if the money doesn't come from already taxed income in Thailand. Anyway the limit is 20 mil for family members and 10 mil for others, not 100 mil, which is inheritance tax.

An RD order should not be able to cancel a royal decree but the RD DG is effectively using his order to modify the Revenue Code which is an Act of Parliament which can only be amended by parliament. It would to be overreach of authority in either case. The BOI reports to the PM Office BTW. The loophole in the royal decree is that it only exempts prior year income, ie the year covered in a tax return. It doesn’t cover years before that which the RD says will not be taxable. For example, if you have an LTR visa and you remit $20k last year which you can show you earned last year, no problem. But, if you remitted $1m last year to buy property and can only you earned $20k of that last year, you could be made to 35.% tax on the whole million bar 20k. The RD could assume the power to issue an order clarifying this point too, will this happen? Probably not? But who would have guessed the RD would amend an Act of Parliament with a lowly RD order? Nothing is sure in this environment where government departments feel free to break their own laws and constitution with support from the PM and finance minister.

“According to the MP of Surin, Paetongtarn is not only viewed as a daughter of the de facto party boss but as politically-versed, proactive and charismatic.” what a joke. How long would she survive in politics without her father? I wonder how long Thaksin plans for Srettha to be in the PM job.

Under most tax treaties TH has a right to tax pensions other than government service pensions and US social security, Even the UK state pension is not protected. TH can demand the tax and tell you you claim a refund of tax paid to your home country. The UK’s HMRC has s very complicated form for this.

As Baker McKenzie pointed out, this a major tax change that should be done through amending the Revenue Code in parliament which would give time for all to share views but Srettha might be defeated. Just reinterpreting an existing law that has stood for decades is a a dishonest sleight of hand tactic. https://insightplus.bakermckenzie.com/bm/tax/thailand-offshore-sourced-income-brought-into-thailand-from-1-january-2024-onward-will-be-subject-to-thai-personal-income-tax/

His way of addressing inequality is to aid and abet tax avoidance by billionaire families that sell him land. The hundreds of millions in tax avoided in that one deal is more than than the tax he will collect from all the exist pensioners.

Another one the following year.

Same smoke and mirrors act used for the rice pledging scam the debt of which has not yet been paid off. It effects ordinary people because the government will have to issue a lot of bonds to fund GSB which will tighten credit conditions, causing companies to cut back on expansion and investment which hits jobs.

I don't think it could impact a Royal Decree signed by the PM. It is an RD order signed by the DG of the RD. So it can only cancel other orders and regulations that are RD orders or equivalent under the DG. You can't have a director general ordering decrees that have the force of law But the wording of the Royal Decree is now defective because it doesn't exempt from tax foreign sourced earnings prior to the previous tax year. So their situation would be the reverse of the current situation, if enforced literally,

The wording of the Royal Decree does indeed give exemption from tax for foreign sourced income derived in the previous year. It was presumably worded like that because the Revenue Code only makes foreign sourced income only from the previous year assessable when remitted to Thailand. But now the director general has said that clause no longer means what it says and any prior year income remitted to Thailand is taxable. So foreign sourced income earned by LTR visa holders in years prior to the previous tax year are technically assessable when remitted to Thailand.

Saw an old friend today who said he had been harassed by the RD a few years ago. He was based in TH for years but worked offshore and had no Thai sourced income. Then after he retired in Bkk he was employed for a couple of years by the Bkk office of an international firm as an advisor which landed him in the Thai tax net for the first time. After his contract expired he stopped filing income tax returns as his only income was a European pension already taxed at source. So he assumed no assessable income, no more tax returns. Suddenly one day a delegation from the RD shows up unannounced at his house demanding that he file tax returns again and pay tax on his foreign sourced income. His Thai daughter dealt with them and they ended up agreeing that his pension was not assessable because it was already taxed at source in a DTA country. The next year they showed up again with the same demands. My friend is very irascible and was visibly upset with the RD officers since his his assessable tax situation was still the same as the previous year. Eventually his daughter gave the boss man 1,000 baht to go away and not come back. So far they haven't.

Get used to receiving 0.5% interest in TH, vs 5.5% in USD offshore.

That is inheritance tax. The gift tax kicks in at 20 million for gifts from direct family and 10 million from others. I am not sure how frequently you can receive gifts from the same donor.

Thanks for the response. People from some countries may have trouble getting those documents with electronic signature from tax authorities. I have an accountant prepare my UK tax return but I don't recall receiving any kind of hard copy or electronic document that would be of use from HMRC. I just have my own tax returns and some tax invoices but no receipts from HMRC. I think Vukovar's experience in filing tax returns and getting double tax treaty relief from the RD on foreign source pension indicates that they feel they are capable of implementing this without any further ado. So there might not be any more information or guidelines forthcoming at all. Just do your tax return in 2025 and figure it out for yourself. Online filing seems out of the question as there is no way to apply for tax credits.

The minister is saying that trawler owners would prefer to make modest payments to him to avoid the investment required to comply with international standards. Just throw the press ganged workers over board if they are too exhausted to work any more or complain. It's much easier.

Mea culpa. Yes 100 million not 1 million is the threshold for Thai inheritance tax but Settha has just ordered the RD come up with a plan to increase revenue from IHT and Land & Buildings tax. IHT is charged on Thai assets regardless of where the beneficiary resides. It is charged on foreign assets, if the heir is Thai or resides in Thailand according to Immigration laws, whatever that means. There is obviously potential for overlapping jurisdictions on IHT with Thailand and other countries claiming global jurisdiction over inheritances by their citizens which might become more of an issue, if Thailand amends its inheritance tax with lower thresholds and higher rates. This is further complicated by different approaches to IHT, eg the UK taxes estates but Thailand and EU countries tax heirs. The UK Thai DTA specified inheritance as something that can be taxed in Thailand, even though Thailand had no IHT at the time.

If they go ahead with demanding tax returns from foreigners without locally sourced income, they should at least produce tax return forms in English and add spaces for DTA tax credits with guideline notes explaining what is deductible under each of the 60+ DTAs and what supporting documents will be required. They publish English versions of the forms for guidance but don’t allow you to submit the English versions and there can be differences in the English versions too. I have seen cases where the Thai version had been updated but they had not bothered to update the English version, so that new clauses were missing and the numbers of clauses were wrong. With locally sourced income and no tax credits etc it is possible to file a PNG 90 tax return online, if you can read Thai well enough but otherwise virtually impossible as important messages keep popping up in tiny Thai script. If they are going to tax thousands of foreign retirees, perhaps they should recruit more staff capable of working in English, or perhaps improve the very expensive but poor quality public education system which teaches kids English from primary school to university but creates end products that are incapable of using English in a work situation or even having a basic conversation in the language.

Your experience with the RD sounds horrific, particularly with a relatively small amount of tax at stake. I have been in the Thai tax net for years owing to locally sourced income but they have never been difficult over personal income tax, presumably because they are familiar with the standard Thai documents they request. Did they make you get translations of your home country tax documents, which I guess were not in English, if you are from the EU, unless from Ireland? Also did they need copies of the originals certified by the tax authority. Did the RD deduct the tax you paid overseas from your Thai tax obligation or did they make you pay the Thai tax and claim a tax refund from your home country?

Inheritance tax in Thailand is exempted between spouses and otherwise only payable over l million baht. In the UK it is also generally exempted but only for foreign spouses, if the have lived in the UK and have an NHS number.

It’s particularly disconcerting the way different offices and individual officials are allowed to interpret the law as they please or even just ignore it. We see this with Immigration, Customs, Land offices and District Offices regularly. No reason why RD should be different. Thailand is not a rule of law jurisdiction. It’s rule of incompetence and corruption.