Dogmatix

Regulations like this are usually introduced in a very vague way without clear guidelines to the banks which causes them to overreact for fear of getting into trouble. When they first introduced money laundering regulations I was a PR but was not working at the time. I went into Bangkok Bank to get a new savings book and a horrible old crone ordered me to close my account due to the new regulations. I asked her to show me the part in the money laundry regs that required banks to close accounts for permanent residents and, of course, she couldn't but said head office had instructed them to do this. So I asked her to get someone from head office on the phone to confirm that they were really closing accounts of all permanent residents and force them to remain unbanked for the rest of their days. With considerable ill grace she eventually got someone from HO on the phone and he told her to pass the phone to me. The guy apologised profusely for the woman's ignorance and incompetence and ordered her to issue a new savings book, as requested. Me 1 old crone 0.

That's right but minimum deposits are quite high for most types of account.

Try opening an account in the UK as a non-permanent resident or even a UK citizen without a permanent address in the UK you can verify.

One thing that was completely dumb in the reinterpretion was not to carve out an exemption for remitted income being reinvested in Thai assets, say, property, stocks bonds, private companies. It would have been easy to specify investments held for 3 or years or whatever. But they just wanted to do it in an incredibly lazy and stupid way by letting the Revenue Department reinterpret the existing law in a way that was clearly never intended without any amendment or even thinking it through. Now they obvious has dawned on the dumbos that it cut investment inflows and will raise a minimal amount of increment tax which may not even cover the cost of attempting to collect it.

He still pretends that the reinterpretation was done under pressure from OECD which has never shown any interest in personal income tax. This was just an excuse. The whole thrust of OECD on tax is limited to corporate income taxes and getting members to impose minimum 15% corporate taxes, while ensuring that multinationals don't avoid this by using multiple tax domiciles through subsidiaries. Thailand is not even a member of OECD and is unlikely to quality for the foreseeable future. Since he is presumably an intelligent person, he must know that personal income tax is nothing to do with OECD. How can Thais trust someone whose argument is predicated on an obvious lie? And what about the pronouncements by the Revenue Department that Thailand will introduce global tax this year and has already drafted the simple amendment to the Revenue Code? Should we put 2 and 2 together and accept that the way to encourage more investment capital remitted to Thailand will be to introduce global taxation, so it is doesn't matter, if you remit your income to Thailand or not because they will tax the b'jezus out of it before you even remit it to Thailand.

Deleted by Dog.

This article popped up next to one about Thaksin's plans for casinos which he hopes will make him billions in graft. How appropriate.

USAID to Thailand was only $104,000 in 2023. Admittedly that is increased by NGOs that provide more funding by coat tailing USAID projects but the total to Thailand is still small. The Thai government could easily take over these projects and should because it having untreated sick people, some of whom have infectious diseases within its borders is a threat to its own population.

The fraud is in fact successive UK governments defrauding pensioners of their contributory pension rights because they live in one country rather than another.

Now that PP has been weakened by successive court rulings that have deprived it of a credible leadership team, Thai politics is a battle between two arch crooks with little to choose between their nefarious pasts and evil designs on the country.

Tensions are simmering in Pai, Mae Hong Son, as anti-Semitic sentiments have surfaced No. There is no sign of anti-Semitic sentiment here. Semitic peoples are in fact mainly Arabs with a very small percentage of Jews who are also, of course, Semitic people. There is also no sign of anti-Jewish sentiment - just anti-Israeli sentiment brought on decent, law abiding Israeli tourists by a small minority of their countrymen who behave in an obnoxious and criminal manner in Pai. If a certain nationality group behaves it that way, even though it is discriminatory and wrong, it is understandable that Thai business owners don't want them in their premises. Hopefully Thai police can root out some of the Israeli law breakers and have them deported and blacklisted for life to reduce the problem. But that's a faint hope. So businesses will continue to exclude Israelis.

Clearly they have circumstantial evidence but not enough after many years of investigation to charge him. He didn't confess. So they have to give him bail. They didn't apply for extradition from Thailand. Thailand just used the Interior Minister's discretion to revoke his visa which doesn't require evidence or a specific reason. Danger to public safety or morality is enough. He was hiding in plain sight in Thailand under his own name.

The pot calling the kettle black. Two obnoxious characters in Thai politics who are both interested only in power and self enrichment.

Order the KN95 masks from China on AliExpress at a reasonable price. The N95 masks are very expensive and too uncomfortable to wear for more than a few minutes at a time. The KN95 masks are a good compromise - comfortable for long periods and fit round the mouth and nose quite well. Much better than the Thai masks that are also made in China which are useless because there is such big gap around the mouth and nose. Those are only designed to protect you from being splashed with blood or other undesirable liquids, not to prevent pollution or viruses from entering your respiratory system.

Will the government also advise tourists to work from home, i.e. stay in their hotel rooms which have no air purification systems and avoid going outside to visit temples, buy handicrafts and fake brand name goods and provide income for bars and hookers?

You will probably be in big trouble if you file showing non-assessable income from remittances earned before 2024 or DTA exempt pensions. That will just invite them to summon for a grilling with all supporting documents which they may or may not be able to understand. They may ask for notarized versions and god knows what. They are used to the Thai system where a taxpayer can waltz into a tax office without an appointment and get certified copies of tax returns which implies tax paid. They are also used to Thai systems of contract notes and dividend statements which have to be sent in hard copy. Some online brokers don't provide formal contract notes. There is also the problem of varying tax years, so that expats will yet not have overeas tax returns covering some remitted income. The worst situation with the RD is being caught not filing when there was a lot of tax to pay. If there is no tax to pay, you can be fined 2k a year but, in practice they don't enforce this law on those who have no tax to pay.

The threshold to file a tax return is 120k for income from employment and 60k for income from other sources. The RD considers pension income as income from employments AFAIK. It used to be that there was no need to file a tax return, if your income minus deductions below the taxable threshold which is currently 150 but the Prayut government amended the law to require tax returns from those over the 120k/60k thresholds even though they have no tax to pay. The idea is to try to trap people into the system when they not earning enough to pay tax and don't mind getting in so much and keep them in once they are earning more. They also added an inducement that would pay welfare to low income earners who file for tax but never have. I don't think this system has been at all effective. Most Thais don't realise they have to file for tax when they don't earn enough to pay it. The fine for not filing is 2k per year but not enforced on low income earners because it would be a lot of work and expense to round them up and take them to court for small fines and it would create a horrible political backlash to fine poor people for not filing when the supposed benefits for filing have never been delivered to them. BTW the Revenue Code is nationality blind. So all tax provisions apply equally to Thais and foreigners.

If the money remitted to buy a condo was earned after 31 December 2023 and you don't have a the appropriate LTR visa for tax exemption, the answer is yes. Otherwise no. Despite the fact that the PM at the time was a condo developer, the government didn't think to make any exemption for money remitted to buy property. Duh! Similar exemptions to investment in Thai stocks, private businesses or Thai bonds might have been a good idea too. But this was clearly not thought through by the government. In fact they were not even involved. There was no amendment to the Revenue code that would have had to go through parliament and no ministerial regulation that would have been approved by the finance minister. They just allowed the director general of the Revenue Department to issue a departmental order which is only binding on Revenue Department staff, not on taxpayers. A few days after signing the order, he vacated the position. So the badly thought out order was his parting shot for Thai taxpayers and expats. This situation is the type of mess that results from government not doing its job and just allowing bureaucrats to do what they want without any parliamentary scrutiny or public scrutiny.

I went on a business trip to India as a young impressionable chap out from London in the 80s. Stayed at the Taj Mahal in Bombay and went out for a walk near the Gate of India. After nightfall it was a a complete horror show - people sleeping all over the streets and peeing and pooping wherever they could. And that was near a 5-stay hotel in the city. Imagine what it was like and still is in the rural areas.

This is what you need for your car. https://shopee.co.th/Male-Female-Emergency-Urinal-Go-out-Travel-Camping-Car-Toilet-Pee-Bottle-i.1058865732.25517018400

If they pee in their hotel, it will end up untreated n the sea anyway but will just take a bit longer. So why the fuss. I remember as a boy in Edinburgh that bus drivers and conductors would jump up of the bus at a bus stop near a telephone kiosk and relieve themselves in the telephone kiosk. I suppose better than doing it on the drivers seat.

The Shin family has always put personal advantages and enrichment to the fore when governing Thailand but Thaksin implemented a handful of worthwhile policies, such as universal healthcare from the amongst the ideas offered by his advisors. Now the decent advisors have fled and his policy cupboard is bare leaving only free handouts, casinos and a disadvantageous oil and gas deal with his buddy Hun Sen. Whoever get the casinos and the oil and gas done can potentially make a pile of cash on the side but nothing there for the hai people.

She was set up by her brother. She was convicted because she was president of the Rice Commission which approved the rice pledging scam, even though she only attended one or two meetings. The conviction was perfectly sound IMHO. There was a scam which she approved, even if she knew nothing much about it. The others who went to prison included the minister and deputy minister who signed approvals for the fake exports of rice to China which never left the country but were actually re-pledged to the Thai government. They knew what they were doing and were paid for their approvals. Yingluck probably didn't know the details of the individual frauds but must have known something was badly wrong, or would have known, if she had looked into it. She got the sentence she deserved but the junta let her escape because they were scared of making her a rallying point for Thaksinites, if she went to prison which probably would indeed have been a problem for them.

Definitely need a TIN to register for online filing of PND 90 or 91. These only in Thai and are quite difficult to fill in, unless you have a good knowledge of the Revenue Code. Income and deductions are based on their enumeration in the RC. Little pop ups tend to occur in tiny Thai letters. But, if you can use them, they save a lot of trouble as they calculate tax for you. Thai dividends can be automatically input from the Thai Stock Depository and calculated out with tax rebate benefit too. Last year some of the self proclaimed Thai experts here assured everyone the Revenue Department was going to produce English language PND 90 and 91 forms and that the Thai and English versions woul be amended to provide space for claiming relief under double tax treaties. I said that wasn't going to happen and, as expected, it turned out to be a fantasy. Now the only way you can file, if you can't read Thai and/ or want to claim DTA relief is to go along to you local tax office in person and let them do it for you. Can't wait for the thread with farangs' experiences of trying to do this and for news of farangs audited/shaken down by revenue officials for not declaring remittances.

In Thailand ordinary people would probably be awarded 80,000 baht which would never be paid. In England they are ordinary people too.