Dogmatix

They are qualified to treat patients with herbs and traditional medicines. You can find in traditional medicine clinics.

There must be a lot of other convicts in prison who would also make good advisors to the government like the activists rotting away on LM and Computer Crimes Act charges. Pardon them too. And don’t forget Thaksin’s pending LM prosecution.

There is a long letter in the Bangkok Post on this today which I am not allowed to post or link here. Among other things it implies that decreeing a new meaning of an existing law other than what was intended by parliament, rather than amending it in parliament is dubious legally. But I wonder if anyone would challenge it in court. On the other hand I would doubt that Srettha would feel confident about getting this through parliament. His “pro-dictatorship” friends have more seats than PT and many are likely to have accumulated substantial offshore funds through various mechanisms while in power. Also many PT MPs will not like it.

Yes they did something like that before or even worse. You used to have to pay a fee to the RD to get a tax clearance certificate for a foreigner to show to Immigration to prove your tax was paid up to date to leave the country. The YouTube presentation by a group of expat financial advisors earlier in the thread warns that they expect Immigration to demand tax receipts in order to renew retirement and marriage extensions and will probably require tax paid at least on the minimum of 67k a month.

The difference is that they have made people frantic wondering how they are going to survive in Thailand with their overseas savings taxed as income by some greedy boneheads trying to make others pay for their vote buying, so they can stay in power enriching themselves with corruption.

Something raised by a friend was the possibility of taxing international health insurance payouts in Thailand. If you claim for an operation in Thailand on your overseas insurance policy, will the remittance either to you directly or the hospital trigger off a tax demand due to income receive from overseas? Companies like AXA now use a Thai payment agent to make the payments to hospitals which would it even easier for the RD to track this “windfall” type of overseas income.

The RD spokesman was not being very truthful when he claimed there was international pressure on Thailand to do this. No other countries tax overseas income earned years ago on a remittance basis AFAIK and taxing on a remittance basis is virtually unheard of. The pressure from OECD, particularly the US and UK has been to set minimum corporate tax rates to make it harder for companies to avoid tax by shifting their domiciles to low tax jurisdictions like Ireland and Luxemburg but it is not the same for individuals because they have to actually live in a place to become a tax resident and the US which exerts most of the pressure re corporate tax doesn’t care what Thailand does te personal tax anyway because it taxes its citizens on a global basis. You won’t see countries like Singapore, HK and the gulf states suddenly taxing offshore personal income under international pressure. Yes, there is international to collaborate with Common Reporting Standards (CRS) and FATCA etc and provide information on financial accounts of foreigners in Thailand, which in the case of FATCA ThAiland only complied with under threat of being cut off from the US correspondence banking system and thus international USD transactions. But it is huge distortion to blame international pressure for what they have just done. It seems to be the usual Thai government approach to assume that all Thai people are morons incapable of accessing any information in English from overseas and to blame foreigners for all nasty things they do themselves (remember the unwashed foreigners spreading COVID).

An interesting question is whether banks would be ordered to withhold tax on all individuals to Thai or foreign individuals, maybe over a certain amount. So far withholding tax is applied to interest, dividends, services from contractors, property sales. In case of dividends, 10% tax is deducted and you have the choice of accepting that or filing them with your tax return, if you think you can get some tax back. Since many foreigners will have a problem figuring out tax returns, they might do the same and let you choose to accept the withholding tax or file, if you have tax credits or otherwise think you can get some of the tax back. Of course that would mean waiting up to about 18 months to get a refund which would be somewhat inconvenient for some. On the other hand, leaving it up to foreigners to declare and pay at the end of the year would result in lost revenue from those who might accumulate a large tax bill over a few years of not filing and then flee the country when they start getting threatening letters. But the currently the law requires you do a self assessment, file a tax return and then pay any tax due.

At a guess I would say that this issue needs to be cleared up either by the Thai RD figuring it out by itself and issuing a regulation to cover it (highly unlikely) or by the Australian government negotiating an amendment to the Thai-Australia double tax treaty, which would take years. Until either of those things happen, it seems unlikely you would be able to produce documentation to convince the RD to allow a tax credit. But Srettha doesn't care. He just wants short term fixes that he can tell TV reporters will be done in 3 or 6 months, just like he is going to get rid of cannabis and speed pills. When the time comes and nothing happens he hopes to have moved the newsflow on.

Based on a Revenue Department order which is real.

I think anything you remit to TH before 1 Jan 2024 is home and clear but after that maybe not. What happens is that fill in your PNG 90 tax return which hopefully will be revised adding spaces to deduct DTA tax credits on overseas income by Jan-Mar 2025 which will be the first time you have to report this stuff (i.e. for the l2024 tax year) and you will pay tax based on that calculation, if any is owing. Then they will send you a letter with a list of supporting documents you have to submit to the RD which will for sure include evidence of the sale of property or whatever generated the income and evidence of tax credits, if you are claiming any, all probably with certified and notarised Thai translations. They will attempt to match the tax credits with the income to be sure there is a match which may only be the case, if you remit the exact amount you paid tax on. They will have many reasons to reject your tax credits to be sure.

Of all the groups affected the real estate developers will have the most impact on Srettha for obvious reasons. He is not going to care about expats because there are already exemptions for Elite and LTR visas and these are the only retirees they want. The Thai stock traders are one of the target groups. So they won't get any quarter. I can see an exemption for funds remitted by foreigners to buy condos or long leases transferred at the Land Department in the name of the foreign, i.e. not Thai wives' names. There would be follow up to ensure the property was purchased and might be a minimum holding period of say 5 years like the LTFs and RMFs where you have to pay the tax saved, if you sell early, to prevent people bringing in a boatload of cash for a luxury condo and then flipping, paying only about 5% in tax instead 30-35% This would take some time to draft and legislate. So it might come after the new rule has taken effect puttin the market in limbo for a year or two.

That is what the procedure according to the Revenue Code, no part of which has been amended. This is just a reinterpretation of one word in Section 41 with the meaning changed by a malevolent stretch of the imagination from "the previous tax year" to "any previous tax year". Under the Revenue Code any tax resident with taxable income from overseas has to declare it himself in a PNG 90 tax return. Passive tax returns, where everything is worked out for the tax payer can be done via PNG 91 but that is only applicable to salary earned in Thailand which is calculated by the employer. If you are a Thai salary earner and don't wish to claim any of your personal allowances, you can just leave it at that. All other types of taxable income, you have to decide for yourself and declare it. If they don't agree, they can charge you back taxes, interest and penalty many years later. So no. You are not going to get a letter from the RD saying that, based on the inward remittances you received during the tax year, you owe XXX baht in tax calculated by them.

Will the real Kamnan Nok and the real Thaksin Shinawatra please step forward (wherever you are).

The truth is that none of the complexities have even been thought of. The law exists to charge tax on overseas income but it has not been applied because no one ever admitted to transferring income in the year it was earned. There is not even a space on the tax returns to enter tax credits from DTA countries and will apply to Thai overseas stock traders too because they get withholding tax deducted from dividends in many countries too. This is just a work in progress from the RD that went up to Srettha as finance minister for approval while he was packing his bag to get on his million dollar flight with his daughter. Under pressure to fund the digital wallet fiasco, he said yes what a great idea and left for the airport.

That’s a great example. Assuming they had already become Thai tax residents in the tax year they remitted the funds, John and Mary need to file a PNG 90 tax return for that year. If we assume the 10m they remit is from the profit, then that, as income from the sale of overseas immovable property, that is fully taxable in Thailand and they have no tax credit to apply because they didn’t pay UK tax on the gain. They will get the standard Thai tax allowances but their high income for the year will likely push them into the top marginal tax rate of 35%. Most likely any of the original principle used to buy the house would be lumped in as taxable income too because there is no clear way to separate it out. UK gives full tax break for sale of primary residence but TH does not. Thai tax on sale of property by individuals is calculated on a purely transactional basis on the total sales price according to a slightly complex formula based on how many years held without reference to your other income or top marginal tax rate. This rarely works out at more than 5% of the sales price with room for cheating if the sales price is less than the govt appraisal price. But this only applies to Thai property transacted at the Land Dept. Conclusion. John and Mary decide not to buy the 30 year lease which structurally is a poor investment anyway. They continue renting in Thailand and transfer their capital gains in smaller annual portions incurring lower marginal tax rates. The numbers would probably look better if they took separate remittances and each filed their own tax returns rather than as a married couple. To file as a married couple they will need to submit a certified translation of their marriage translation certificate further notarized by the Foreign Ministry anyway.

Just grandstanding for the domestic audience. US companies know where Thailand is already and, if they are interested, they invest here regardless of what Thai politicians say.

It will not be a case of just waiting to see how they classify your overseas income when you remit some money in. You will be required to classify it yourself and file a tax return accordingly. They may or may not investigate you and demand documentary evidence but they can and do go back many years. When they decide to do a random inspection, they work hard to try to find a reason to charge back tax, interest and penalties to make it worth their while. Don't ask me how I know this.

According to what little they have said so far, you could take a tax credit for the 10% tax already paid, if your country has a double tax agreement with Thailand. Then, depending on what is your top marginal rate of Thai tax, you might have to pay some more tax, since foreign dividends are taxable as normal income at rates ranging from 0 to 35%

He plans to do something within 6 months and already knows what that is but refuses to share this information with the public. What a sleaze.

How does this help? It just kicks the can down the road, if they still have to pay in the end.

For sure. Starting with some bloated consulting projects for relatives of ministers.

555. Yes I remember the PR messaging TRT put out that about him being so rich he didn't need to rip off the taxpayers like all other politicians. How wrong that proved to be.

No need to wait for him to get out of jail because he got out of jail a couple of hours after he arrived there and has been busy running the country from behind the scenes ever since.

Hopefully this will be the case but no one knows how this will be implemented and what burden of proof will be required for past tax credits which may be some years in the past. The RD has no experience of this and will probably come up with some utterly impractical requirements. In the same way as they announced this order without thinking it through or consulting anyone outside they will probably do the same in setting out the details.