Dogmatix

Did you also get points off your licence? The fines can be paid in a few seconds with mobile banking using the barcode on the ticket. Very convenient but I have managed to avoid them by being more careful about speed limits the last year. Other drivers still race past me when I am doing a couple of kpm under the limt though.

what did she call him - water monitor lizard I bet.

Get them to come and run businesses in Thailand and then tax them at 35% when they decide to bring in money to buy a condo. HK is a low tax regime and doesn't tax foreign source income at all.

One issue I am looking is assessable income on sale of UK property. If I sell, UK CGT will be 28%. Presumably the RD is going to want to tax the principle since I was already a Thai tax resident when I purchased it and I have no way of showing it was purchased from taxed income. So, if I remit to Thailand only the profit on which UK CGT has been paid and not the principle, would the RD accept a tax credit for the 28% CGT and just charge me the difference between the top rate of Thai tax of 35% and 28%? Or would they even accept that the principle is not assessable? I don't suppose they have bothered to think about this sort of issue or will just charge 35% on principle that was already overseas and profit with hopefully a tax credit for the CGT. At any rate it is iniquitous and unfair to charge 35% tax on remittance of property proceeds when Thai property is taxed at a flat rate that hardly ever gets over 5% of the appraisal value and that is not even added to your annual income. So you can sell hundreds of millions worth of Thai property and not even be at the top 35% tax rate that kicks in over 5 million. You would think they would want to encourage rich Thais who buy property for their kids studying in London to sell up and remit the profits back to Thailand when they don't need the property any more with reasonable tax rates but they are just applying a sourced earth policy like the communists have taken over or something. I suppose the Thai investors can just remit the principle back and leave the profits overseas but that is not beneficial for the Thai economy.

HMRC now sends notices to taxpayers informing them that they are aware they received some income from overseas and that they should declare it. They don't give you any more details. So, if you received foreign income from several sources, you don't know which one they have nailed. I received one of these notices last year, obviously from CRS reporting from HK or somewhere else I have an account, even though I got out of the UK tax net over 30 years ago. If you are not a tax resident, you are obliged to write to them and inform them or they will keep harassing you. They are too lazy to look up your file and check whether you are a tax resident or not. Since Thailand will continue to use the remittance basis, at least at first, this kind of notification would be pointless. However, what they might do is send you a notice every time you receive a remittance or a remittance over a certain amount.

Another issue would be that farangs don't have unique family names like Thais. So tracking down transactions by all the John Smiths who are tax residents might be challenging. On the other hand, if you have a debit or credit card issued by your overseas bank that is already providing CRS data, it would be very easy for the bank to provide information on transactions, if the RD should ask for it.

BTW does Thailand tax gains on sales of gold bullion, other precious metals and collectibles? I can't see them specifically mentioned in Section 40. But even if not taxed onshore, I guess it would be too much to hope that foreign gains would not be assessable. The UK doesn't tax gains on wasting assets like wine with an expected life of less than 50 years but I think taxes all other collectibles. Don't suppose Thailand exempts wine.

Good point. Time was that foreign governments could only get information from Swiss banks when investigating a crime that was also a crime in Switzerland but CRS ended that. I am sure they can request records, at least in the same forward, going back longer and more detail, if they have a good reason.

Yes. The credit card companies and/or banks in Thailand that process the transactions can get access to more information than that, I guess. The government was at one time talking about getting Thai banks to report e-commerce transactions by Thais buying stuff abroad to charge them VAT. Foreign card holders could be traced by the banks by contacting their overseas counterparts. The question is would they bother to set this up? Tax residents using foreign cards in Thailand must be small beer. Only foreigners and Thais who have lived overseas, buried in a sea of tourist transactions. Not impossible but unlikely to be a priority. lt might be asking for trouble to put large recurrent items on a foreign card though, e.g. international school fees. One offs like hospital bills probably OK.

This is not what is planned at this point. There is no amendment to the Revenue Code, just an administrative order to RD staff. So they can only demand what is currently demanded, i.e. a tax return showing assessable income which in the case of foreign source income remitted to Thailand. What they might, if they amend the law in future, is anyone's guess.

The subs will compliment the the aircraft carrier and will only be used on Children's Day to let kids climb all over them. So the engine controversy is irrelevant. They can just order without engine and install a long tailed boat engine for moving around in the harbour.

Seems that the poor Burmese lady was not overwhelmed by the father's prostration and offer of cash and has found herself a Thai lawyer (contingency fees I guess) to file criminal and civil charges against her daughter's murderer and his parents. With the parents as co-defendants in a civil case, they will be liable for whatever damages are awarded against their son and may be ordered to pay damages in their own right. How could they not notice that little Indy had live ammo stacked around in his bedroom? Did they never do in there or did they let him stay alone in the condo in Sathorn and never visit? Who took him to the firing range which would definitely to allow a 14 year to shoot unaccompanied by an adult? Still no answers to these questions.

Lucky he didn't use a gun or Anutin and Chada would round there like a shot granstanding.

The surveillance of foreigners is well founded because, if you get murdered by a foreigner, the murderer's parents will not attend your funeral and grovel on the floor at your loved one's feet, begging for forgiveness and holding out a bag of money.

Tosakit is a rather pathetic attempt to translate the name of police chiefTorsak Sukvimol. I don't know how they got that from ต่อศักดิ์ which has a silent mark over the "di" at the end which would be Torsakdi, if it didn't. Some Thais just write down the first thing that comes into their heads when they transliterate names of other Thais without regard for how the name is pronounced or how the owner spells it in English themselves.

A Swiss banker told me that since Thailand only signed up for CRS this year, the first information that will go to the Thai government will for calendar year 2024. They have to provide Balance as of 31 Dec 2023 and 31 Dec 2024 and income during the year, which I believe includes interest, dividends and external inflows. That means the RD won't have any information from overseas financial institution on income and inflows during 2023 to help it investigate remittances in 2023 to determine whether they were income earned in 2023 or earlier. That won't stop them demanding supporting documents of course. However, I think there is an argument in favour of only starting to get tough in respect of 2024 when the prior year loophole is gone. No guarantees but I would guess they will not trouble too much to investigate large remittances between now and the year end which don't need to be entered on tax returns unless the income was earned this year.

How does this work? You have bitcoin somewhere which is not notifiable under CRS and don't have to pay Thai tax on gains?

Not if that's the only income you have. It is just below the threshold.

It seems that anyone surviving in Thailand on a full frozen UK state pension without other income would just squeeze into the Thai tax net. Taking basic deduction of 60k plus 190k over 65 deduction would put them about 85k over the 150k threshold and that would be in the lowest progressive rate of 5% resulting in about 4k tax which would be payable in Thailand without tax credit, as it would be below the threshold in the UK. Any private pension or other UK income puts you into higher Thai tax rates but as UK tax kicks in over the UK threshold, the Thai tax take net of tax credit is still going to be quite low. However, the low Thai tax threshold means that every single UK pensioner who has at least the full frozen pension or equivalent from other sources is liable to Thai tax and will have to file a tax return and pay, in most cases, a small amount of Thai tax after tax credit. If 80k British pensions pay just 4k Thai tax, they will 320 million baht which they will be happy to have. But will it worth the hassle of forcing them to calculate their tax liability, which cases of other income will be quite complicated, and file tax returns? I doubt it, once you net off economic losses from retirees who leave, switch to spending less than 180 days in the Kingdom and decide not to bring in any case for a condo, car or to start a business to avoid being taxed at 35%. Definitely a huge amount of greed without much thought put into it.

Non-state pensions are not exempt in any of the DTAs I have looked at.

I called the RD some years ago when I stopped working for a while to ask this question and the answer was that there was no requirement to file a tax return with income below the threshold but I can't tell you that is in the Revenue Code. It may an RD Order. Anyway, as you say, most Thais and migrant workers don't file tax returns and the RD doesn't chase them up. In my case I stopped filing for a few years, then resumed filing with no comment from the RD.

No details of the 30 day insurance tourists are supposed to get in exchange and no projected revenue and costs. Obviously tourists will get little or no benefit from this and the revenue will disappear into a black hole of incompetence and corruptio.

Yes it is tourist tax not a travellers tax as it used to be.

Funny that Thailand refused to condemn a far more widespread attack on Ukraine by Russia.

Apples and oranges. Jenkins was referring to UK state pensions. You quoted from US DTA.