Dogmatix

Not sure that the position of leader of the opposition is at all important. It has been vacant for lengthy periods in the past.

Good for the governor. He is right. PT is pursuing ridiculous unsustainable short term policies that will jack up government debt for no purpose. Constructive long term reform is not on their agenda. Thaksin will try to get rid of Sethaput just like he sacked Chatumongkol as governor in 2001 over similar policy differences.

Less than 20 million Kazakhs but they have oil.

It is hard to get to get to the bottom of this by only reading English language accounts on various websites. If you look at the sources, the Revenue Department Order and the Revenue Code itself even in English translation, it is pretty obvious that that tax residence is the key and there is no difference in the way foreign and Thai tax residents are taxed.

Specially for chinese buyers, the most significant, who have just started coming back. Their tax treaty is only for companies and most of the money they bring in for money laundering anyway.

They are going to have to do this anyway to fund all the populist vote buying garbage but they want to be seen pretending to tax the super rich, ie themselves first. The base rate of VAT is 10% but an order is issued to waive it to 7% every year.. It has just been extended to Sept 2024 maybe for the last time.

I have done this in amounts large enough to require a report to Bank of Thailand just to have a means to re-export the money in future. The bank Fx person called to ask the purpose of the remittance. I say it’s a loan to purchase property. She says it can be booked as a loan because you are a foreigner. I say stuff you. I am a Thai citizen. Didn’t you look at the copy of my ID card I just sent you. A short argument about me still being a foreigner then she books it as a loan. It should be further explored whether foreigners are really prohibited from receiving offshore loans. Anyway the loan should be remitted by the lender not you and it needs a loan agreement made outside Thailand to avoid Thai stamp duty. There could be a risk that the RD would follow and reclassify the loan as taxable income if never repaid and no interest paid. The Bank of Thailand used to track foreign loans. I once got a call from them asking about the servicing of a foreign loan but it was only for survey purposes. The RD would probably get on to it, if Thais started using this mechanism.

True but in other cases people get pensions that are below the threshold for tax in the country of origin but over the Thai tax threshold which is lower than in farang countries.

A pathetic individual who could not survive for five minutes in politics without her father.

No but the burden might be on the taxpayer to produce documentary evidence on the source of the income and to show it was already taxed in a DTA country. Also what if Thailand just assesses a tax demand which could happen years after the remittance and tells you to reclaim tax paid in the country of origin? The Thai system will be out of kilter with other countries that deal with tax on a prior year basis because the RD is now saying it can tax overseas income that arose years ago which would probably make it impossible to reclaim tax.

A major concern is that this is not just one of those trial balloons. It is a Revenue Department order published in the Royal Gazette that has the force of law just like a ministerial regulation. The order says that from 1 Jan the Clause 41 that says that only previous tax year's foreign income will be taxable, if also remitted in the same tax year, will thenceforce mean foreign income arising at any time in the past will be taxable whenever remitted to Thailand. This seems a complete distortion of the meaning of the clause that has been in force and interpreted in the way we all know and love for decades. So this is a done deal and because it is merely a distortion of the previous interpretation of the law, rather than a proper legal amendment, there may not be any ministerial regulations or other fine print to go with it as this would seem odd when there has been no change in the law. It could be walked back with another RD order saying forget about what we said in the previous order but this would be too much of a loss of face. So seems unlikely. Perhaps Srettha as finance minister does intend to amend the Revenue Code. He is also talking about getting tougher on inheritance tax and land and buildings tax. And perhaps he would try to amend Clause 41, if he did put up a bill. Of course there is no guarantee that coalition partners, many of whom have probably accumulated wealth from corruption offshore would support this particular amendment or others on IHT for example. It would also take some time (at least a year) which Srettha doesn't have to make it look as if he is doing something about funding the digital wallet which he promised not to finance with more government debt. So he sees overseas income as low hanging fruit. No one knows how much it would generate in tax and when the number is known at the end of next year, politics will have moved on.

They will definitely not give foreign residents a more favorable tax regime than Thais. Thais working in countries with no double tax treaty like Israel will be taxed twice on their remittances home. The difference with global taxation is that you can avoid Thai completely, if you never remit the overseas earnings to Thailand but many need the money to live on or buy property, cars etc. Also when global taxation is introduced, a country just starts taxing foreign income that arises after that date. Thailand intends to tax foreign income that arose at any time in the past without time limit, if it is remitted to Thailand.

Face lift or hair transplant?

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.