Dogmatix

The article says young people in Isaan are smoking too much weed which apparently makes people support recriminalisation. 1. Young under age people are not allowed to buy from licensed dispensaries any more than they are allowed to buy alcohol and tobacco. 2. Young people in Isaan can't afford to buy weed from licensed dispensaries. They buy brickweed which is smuggled in from Laos from street dealers. Recriminalisation will probably not effort the availability of brickweed very much.

Srettha is still blurting out superficial nonsense handed to him by Thaksin PR people without being able to answer questions about definition of goals, how to achieve them or assumptions behind projections (oil price Chinese GDP growth etc). He has become a 2 dimensional cardboard cut out to be wheeled around spouting garbage. A lynch pin of this push to a higher income economy seems to be raising minimum wages. Singapore did this in the 80s to chase out the low value added assembly industries and replaced them with higher value added. But Thailand has nothing to replace them with, only low end Chinese tourism. It refuses to reform and decentralize education to provide knowledge workers for higher value added and Srettha threw education in the bin by appointing a cop with a dubious reputation from a Chinese political family and waffling about tablets (again). All very simplistic stuff that Thaksin believes his PR machine can spin into a success story.

The availability of flights is a serious limitation to this policy of being so reliant on low end Chinese tourism for economic growth while booting out the long stay well heeled expats and regular retirees with unfriendly tax policies. By the time there is sufficient flight capacity the visa waiver will be over. It's only for 5 months.

Costa Rica and Panama have a similar security feel to them -relatively safe - but Guatamala, Honduras, El Salvador and Belize in Central America felt much more dangerous to me. I didn't go to Nicaragua. Mexico looks safe but isn't. So does Brazil. Colombia I was hassled on the streets a lot. Cuba is quite safe but no retirement options I don't think.

Not just Thai Privilege/Elite. The million millionaires courted by the previous government with LTR visas now looks even more doubtful. They have an tax exemption via a Royal Decree from the date they get their LTRs but another Royal Decree could easily eliminate that in the interests of “fairness and equality” and the current exemption is not enough for many of them to be able to invest in condos etc without paying 35% remittance tax. They can just blame the Prayut government for any fall out from the LTR visas. If capriciousness of this government is not scary enough, Move Forward Party is waiting to get into power with real social welfare policies, as opposed to Thaksin’s wasteful one-off vote buying schemes. Appalling economic management and atrocious public education for decades now condemns Thailand to permanently sluggish growth, desperately depending on low end Chinese tourism. It is impossible to generate enough tax revenue for the welfare expectations created by politicians without hugely increasing the tax take by whatever desperate means come to hand including a large increase in VAT m, first to 10% and then to European levels and wealth taxes, capital gains tax etc. The noose is tightening.

Still no DTA with Saudi but relations I thawed, workers going back and DTA being discussed. The China DTA surprisingly dates back to the mid 80s before China allowed tourists to come to Thailand. It seems to only deal with company tax, probably cos China was only concerned about its state enterprises then, as there was no large scale private enterprise. I don’t know how this will impact the monied Chinese families who have been moving to TH in large numbers. Their kids are filling up the international schools, so much so that one of the more prominent UK franchises recently put a 20% quota on Chinese students to avoid them contaminating the predominant Thai Chinese culture in the school. I have a feeling that this could have an impact on the new wave of China immigrants. Many allegedly bought Thai condos for money laundering in the past.

The new airport projects are vital to fill PT coffers. They did well out of Swampy under Thaksin's watch when contractors complained they demanded 30% commissions for supplying furniture and stuff and contracts for trolleys and bag handling were given overseas companies with Thai shareholders whose stated addresses were abandoned buildings in Bkk. Now the whole merry go round starts again.

Not mentioned in the Thai Enquirer article is that RD order P 161/2566 is a directive binding only on RD employees. RD P orders are low down in the pecking order, do not have the force of law and are not binding on the general public. Srettha, as finance minister, has spoken in support of the RD's disingenuous reinterpretation of existing law, even though it is an overreach of its authority. It is not clear what the RD and Pheua Thai have in mind at this stage. To make it binding on the public a higher level of announcement is required, e.g. a Royal Decree but that could only take effect no less than 90 days after publication in the Royal Gazette and therefore could not take effect by 1 Jan 2024, as announced by the DG. Will they just leave as an unlawful order by the RD changing tax law and risk being challenged and humiliated in the Central Tax Court? Who is to say? A party that can come up with such a numbskulled scheme as the digital wallet is capable of anything.

I agree with this interpretation that it was indeed parliament's intention to tax only foreign source income earned and remitted in the prior tax year. I have reviewed a legal amendment of Section 40 drafted in the 80s and the drafters used elaborate phraseology to make clear that they meant earned any prior tax year, referring to Thai source income. But in Section 41 they did not and 70 years have passed without any attempt to interpret it differently - until now.

Looks a bit like Prinn who also had a penchant for raping young women working in financial services. Perhaps they will be good buddies comparing notes about their rapes in the pokey.

Better get used to kratom as that's all that will be left after Thaksin has recriminalized cannabis. He might come back for kratom later.

“No, I am not behind gambling websites. Someone just wanted to force me to confess to this crime and implicate certain figures,” Suchanun declared firmly to reporters last Thursday, Minnie dated a policeman who was a major or lt col at the time and it didn't occur to her that he might be married. When she found out she dropped him but got back together with him later on, having presumably decided it no longer mattered that he had a wife and family. She seems to have a credibility rating of close to zero.

It's hard to imagine that Thailand's "infinite appeal" will endure in the mind of an LTR retiree faced with RD inspectors showing up at his 20 mil condo in Phuket demanding 10 mil in tax, interest and penalties, 5 years after he bought the condo. It also makes sense that people who already tax residents or will be in their first year would abandon plans to buy condos with taxable past savings.

Given that there has only been an order issued for RD staff to reinterpret the Revenue Code other than it has been interpreted with copious rulings and precedents for 38 years and there has been nothing with the force of law binding on taxpayers to follow that interpretation, it seems to follow that something more binding will be issued by the government itself, if it plans to go ahead with this. In the worst case, that could be a Royal Decree amending the Revenue Code along the lines of 161/2566 but even that could not be effective by 1 Jan 2024 because announcements in the Royal Gazette need to give at least 90 days notice. It is a real mystery what Srettha as finance minister or his Phuea Thai masters plan to do with this. Leave it as it is and risk a backlash from wealthy Thais filing a case in the Central Tax Court and potential humiliation? Rethink it and at least flesh out the details with new tax rates, threshholds etc but that would probably need an Act of Parliament which might not pass, being a major revision, not emergency legislation. Note that PT has recently criticised MFP for its plan to introduce a capital gains tax on Thai stocks, which would incidentally be problematic because foreigners could still avoid it via DTAs) and a wealth tax and has just ditched the Prayut government's plan for a transactional tax on Thai stocks talking about the need to develop the Thai stock market and regional competitiveness. Nothing could be further from these objectives than 161/2566. Srettha justified on ill thought out grounds of equality and fairness without thinking about the potential damage to the Thai economy and competitiveness. He could still blame it on the RD like they have blamed the transactional tax on the Finance Ministry, if he goes no further than this, and pull out. Let's see.

Good stuff. It occurs to me that this only became an issue for the RD after the police order to allow 1 year retirement extensions which I believe was in mid 80s. Prior to that there wasn't any visa more than 3 months apart from PR and NON-B for those with WPs. So the concept of foreigners becoming tax residents and living off foreign source income didn't arise that much.

I think, if the RD wants to build a case based on your example c) it ought to show how much tax is lost through this and I suspect it is not much. A more frequent situation used to arise with multinationals giving expat staff and some senior Thais in Thailand two contracts: for their work in Thailand and for their work outside Thailand. The outside salary was paid somewhere that doesn't tax foreign source income like HK or Singapore, claiming of course that none of the work was performed in that jurisdiction or it would have been taxable there. It's been over 20 years since the last major multinationals (much longer for US multinationals) ceased offering this perk which they had used to save themselves money, as they later had to pay higher salaries to compensate for the higher local taxes on fully onshore packages. Remember that Thailand had a top tax rate of 60% from, I think, only about 2 million baht until the early 90s when it was reduced to 35% and the argument for dual contracts became less compelling. Countries like Malaysia helped stamp it out by establishing its own salary scale for expats in various jobs, eg foreign bank branch manager, and charging them tax on that, if it was more than their declared salary. No need for any investigations, evidence or tax evasion trials. I remember a junior expat colleague posted to KL complaining that he was being charged income tax on a salary significantly higher than the salary he actually received from our firm which was being paid to him entirely in Malaysia. I think most of these people who still have dual contracts are working for businesses that are fairly small but earn income offshore and don't have to worry about their international reputations (unlicensed expat financial advisors who earn commissions from offshore funds and hire expat staff without WPs spring to mind). There may be some Thai consultants working part of the year offshore and earning fees in jurisdictions that don't charge withholding tax but I guess it is a pretty small number. The problem with most of these deals is that the work is usually done largely in Thailand and is therefore taxable anyway. The RD can go after these cases without reinterpreting the existing law by making the taxpayer show his travel record to justify that he spent enough time in the countries where he earned the fees. If just a few days a year, it would not justify earning most of his remuneration outside Thailand.

Chada looks like a mafia boss himself. I suppose it takes one to know one. One question is since this officials are all appointed by the Interior Ministry, why did they hire them in the first place, if they already knew they were gangsters and were able to compile death list in a couple of weeks?

I admired her when she was standing up to Thaksin's death squads during his war on drugs but I lost respect when she promoted the import of the fake explosives detector which the British manufacturer later admitted at his trial had no functional components in them. No action was ever taken against Thai officials, including Pornthip and Prayut, who ordered that junk at vast expense and with large commissions presumably paid by the fraudsters. Her anti-democracy behaviour and rants as a junta appointed senator were the last straw. Son Nam Naa.

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The government's strategy to boost economic growth to its target of 5% next year seems to involve mainly promoting low end Chinese tourism and its digital wallet scheme. It will need a lot of Chinese tourists on zero dollar tours to counteract the increase in government debt caused by the digital wallet and other vote buying schemes as well as the initiative to drive high end foreign retirees out of the country through a remittance tax at 35% which will in turn impact the condo market.

Good. Now cancel the proposed tax on foreign remittances to Thailand. You can blame it on the Revenue Department like you blamed this one on the Finance Ministry.

She was treated with the contempt she deserves for her disgusting behaviour. Suck it up senator.

No. That is resolution 7/2528 (not 2/2528) regarding taxation of interest paid to foreign bank branches by their head offices overseas.

Your points are well made and I will not go through all of them. Much is still unknown, particularly the text and circumstances of 2/2528 which I have so far searched for in Thai in vain. I am not sure if Section 41 dates back to the original Revenue Code of 1938 or was added later but we can imagine that foreign sourced income was not a very important consideration when it was drafted and that few countries had notions of global taxation then either. Also we need to take into account that Thai parliaments often draft legislation with deliberate ambiguity to allow varying interpretations. Re the points above. For some who have been tax residents for decades your interpretation is effectively the year dot. Also for Thais, who are the intended targets, it is from whenever they started earning foreign source income. I have read Thai laws in the original extensively and the impression I get is that, since Thai is not a very precise language, the drafters will often use lengthy phraseology to make sure only one meaning is possible, if they want to be precise. That is why I surmised that the drafters of Section 41 didn't mean any previous tax years because they could have added wording to make that abundantly clear but didn't. I admit that is not conclusive but for me it is a weight of probability.

That means they should work overtime to re-establish their pro-democracy principles.