Dogmatix

If it were really an ambitious tax reform plan the government would have proposed a bill to amend the revenue code in parliament with public consultations and would have tried to get the public and its coalition partners on board. As it was it decided to amend the law by stealth with a scrappy one page order to the effect that from 1 January the law that says foreign income is taxable only if remitted in the year it arises now means that foreign income going back indefinitely is now taxable when remitted to Thailand. An incredibly deceitful and stupid way to distort an existing law rather than amending it with due process. Lawmakers can change any law they want, if a majority agrees to vote for it (not certain in this case) but they should amend it properly and transparently allowing all those affected to understand exactly what has changes with plenty of time to adapt.

Yes, but where do savings come from? Past earnings from employment, from investment, from inheritance, from gifts. All are now deemed taxable income when remitted to Thailand with no time limit on when they arose. In fact overseas inheritance is taxable in Thailand, even if not remitted to the country. The new RD interpretation of the existing Revenue Code says "income earned in any tax year which means that they can go back as many years as they like to the point that the savings were first accumulated. Then they can tax the interest.

These are all justifiable concerns but more likely than withholding tax is the risk that the RD will come after you some years after the remittances with demands for back taxes, interest and penalties which they can inflate ridiculously and place the burden on you to prove otherwise. I got a demand for over 300k taxes, penalties etc from several years earlier in a corporate context. I had to spend 2 half days in the RD office going through documents with them. In the end most of their allegations proved unfounded but I had to admit to an accountant error and paid 36k. I think I would have trouble producing documents for income earned offshore many years ago. The RD’s inspector teams are under great pressure to make Yo government shortfalls in revenue and this can only get worse with the sluggish Thai and Chinese economies bd the need to fund PT’s hair brained popularist vote buying schemes.

The super wealthy like Thaksin have enough onshore wealth not to worry about this. A court decision last year returned him 18 billion of confiscated assets in what was probably a precursor deal to what we have just witnessed. Being in control of the government he can probably amass enough onshore to last his family several more generations without dipping into offshore wealth.

You have to list your spouse on your PNG 90 or PNG 91 tax return. Then there are boxes to check answering questions like do you wish to be taxed jointly or separately or did your spouse have zero income in the year.

There is no change to that part of Section 41 of the Revenue Code. They are just choosing to change the interpretation, so that "previous tax year" will now be deemed to mean "any previous tax year", rather than the "the previous tax year" which is clearly what the intent of the drafters was and how it has been interpreted by the RD for decades.

I think you already know the answer: Srettha minster of finance and prime minister.

In a way this is worse than introducing global taxation on all overseas sourced income whether remitted or not, which exists in most Western countries. With global taxation income earned abroad would just become taxable from day 1. In this case, income earned abroad 20 years ago can still be taxed in Thailand, if you need to remit it for living expenses or buy a condo or something. And they can after you years after the remittance with demands for back tax, interest and penalties. Will you have all records from years back to convince them exactly what was taxed under a DTA and when?

The point not mentioned anywhere yet is that the RD is saying you have to report these offshore earnings in your tax return in the year after remitting them to Thailand and the RD will have access to information from the Thai bank that processed it and will have access to information from your overseas accounts showing year end balances and inflows into the accounts, if you use a Thai address or are a Thai citizen. It is not like you will get a tax bill when remit the money. You will sit and wait for years to see if they come after you with demands for back tax, penalties and interest, if you didn’t fully declare it. If you did declare something but assumed double tax relief, they could ask for the evidence. Similarly if you didn’t file at all on the basis of double tax relief. They don’t have enough inspectors to do all this but can select cases to pursue at random.

This could end up being a remittance tax, if banks send information on inflows to the RD which then checks up tax returns of tax residents to see, if they declared the income or even submitted a tax return at all. The way they work it could take several years before they summon you for questioning. It happened to me in 2021 when I was summoned for a whole day grilling about my company’s tax payments in 2016, 2017 and 2019. They can go back 20 years on most tax issues I think. Then you would need detailed records to show how the income was generated and taxed which they could ask you to translate into Thai and definitely would if in a language other than English. For many it would be easier to pay the assessed tax, penalties and interest or just flee the country.

The problem is that this is just a paragraph ordering RD officers to ignored previous interpretation of Section 41 which was obviously what it was intended to mean and interpret it differently in a way that was not intended by the drafters of the Revenue Code. This is to avoid having to get an amendment to the law passed by parliament which PT might not be able to do, being dependent on it’s coalition partners who might not like the idea of paying tax on corruption money banked offshore. Srettha also wants to deflect criticism that his digital wallet is unfunded and will increase govt debt and can’t wait for a transparent legal amendment which might fail anyway. So there is no fine print to guide implementation. Basically Thai taxpayers who pay tax on Thai stock market capital gains, eg Thai corporates, get no inflation index tax relief on realized long term capital gains. In addition there are no reduced rates for capital gains which are treated as normal income in the year they are rrealized. So your long term gains would be the sale price of the stock minus the original purchase price taxed at the top marginal rate of Thai tax. Since there is no legislation or regulations supporting this, as it is just a deliberate misinterpretation of existing law, there is no time limit on past overseas income other than the date you became Thai tax resident. So technically you could try to prove that salary And capital gains were earned before that. For those in Thailand for many years good luck with that.

Yes. It seems to mean that income earned abroad since you became a tax resident of Thailand from anything, including bank interest, will be taxable whenever remitted to Thailand. Presumably if already taxed in a double tax treaty country, the onus is on you to prove that. How would you do that? No one knows because it is not a new law. It is merely a new interpretation or a misinterpretation of an existing law. All existing supporting regulations don't help because they support the interpretation that only the previous years remitted income is taxable. So probably you will need tax documents from overseas for the exact amount that you remit showing you have paid tax on that. Documents of course to be certified by the overseas tax authority, legalized by a Thai embassy in that country and then translated by a certified translator and notarized by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

That is not what the RD is saying. They are saying that any overseas sourced income parked in a bank account for a number of years and remitted to Thailand is potentially taxable in the year it comes in.

1. No. 2. No.

PT has no right to accuse anyone of playing games after double crossing MFP and reneging on most of its election promises. The whole thing is a game to PT.

People in the travel industry are saying that visaless travel for Chinese will have no immediate impact because the number of flights is still restricted and most are already full. Flights to China and back are still much less than pre-COVID and it takes time for airlines to increase them, as they need to lease new aircraft and hire and train new staff after cutting back to survive.

This will soon be walked back, just like Wissanu's statement that prisoners would no longer get Royal pardons until they have served a third of their sentences last year. Then he turns around and says Thaksin will be eligible immediately and visits him in prison during the few hours he is there.

An act of parliament to amend the Revenue Code could introduce global taxation for Thai residents which would clear up any confusion. The PT think tank has come up with hair brained schemes like the digital wallet for Srettha to implement that are not funded in the 2023-24 budget and Srettha refuses to say where the money is coming from. Then they plan to subsidise mass transit in Bangkok at huge cost that was designed to attract private sector investment because the government couldn't afford to build them. They know that they will ultimately have to raise VAT but before they bite the bullet they will scrabble around trying to raise tax from anywhere.

Now will be taxable whenever it is remitted to Thailand.

I don't think that is correct. There is no banking secrecy law in Thailand and government agencies seem to have no trouble in getting information about people's banking transactions, e.g. the police do it frequently. So why not the RD? Remittances over a certain amount are also automatically reported to the Bank of Thailand for anti-money laundering purposes. I think you should assume that the RD will be able to get assess to any remittance information it wants and may even set up a system of automatic reporting like the Bank of Thailand has.

The problem is that this is a vague order of a couple of paragraphs to Revenue Department officers announcing a major change to the treatment of overseas sourced income with no guidelines as to how to implement it. You are making assumptions based on practice in other countries which may well be different from the assumptions the Revenue Department chooses to make.

Technically your pension income from most European countries will be exempt due a double tax treaty since it is normally taxable there already. However the devil is in the details and we don't know how they will attempt to enforce this. If just up to you to declare and you don't have to declare or file a tax return, if you are covered by a tax treaty, then OK. But if banks are forced to report all incoming remittances to the RD and you have to provide burdensome documentation avoid tax or get tax back, then it will be a disaster.

The Democrats were the party that scuppered the Cannabis Bill on its second reading. They are now in the opposition. Current government parties that were in favour of the Cannabis Bill were BJP, PPRP and UTN and outnumber PT with 147 MPs vs PT's 141. Of course, since it holds the Public Health Ministry, PT can just do what Anutin did last year in reverse and put a one-pager in the Royal Gazette to recriminalize cannabis with no new law or parliamentary scrutiny. They may be counting on Anutin being fat and happy with what he can make out of the Interior Ministry, so he won't rock the boat. On the other hand Srettha talks vacuously about drumming up 5% GDP growth with no concrete plans to do this other than visa free travel for Chinese and Kazaks, despite the poor Chinese economy and lack of flights, and the absurd digital wallet vote one-off buying scheme. So shutting down a promising new economic sector is not going to contribute much of his economic growth promise.

When you think about it there are some suspicious elements of this thread. Middle class Isaan girl attending university with middle class parents who own a shipping business sounds like a fake background. This kind of family doesn’t really exist in Isaan which is landlocked and not a great location for a shipping business. There are middle class and indeed wealthy families in Isaan but they are all Chinese and neither they or their daughters have much interest in marrying farang, unless he is good for several millions in dowry without bargaining. Even so they much prefer to marry other Chinese. I guess we can find this type of stuff forourselves on Reddit without the need to go through AN.

I heard this from a driver who drove us around Chiang Mai province once. His daughter married a cheap charlie farang and he refused to pay sin sot. Then he took her to farangland and refused to give her money to send back to family. But the Isaan family in question is wealthy as they have their own shipping business - perhaps on operating packet steamers on that big lake created by dam in Ubon.