Dogmatix

The main problem is that they are largely targeting Thais who trade stocks offshore which has become quite popular since the Thai stock market has gone nowhere in the last 7 years, while things like US tech stocks have gone through the roof. Most of these are middle class Thais who didn't start off with money overseas but remit cash abroad to trade stocks and want to bring it back over the medium term. They are relatively easy to track. But foreigners start off with cash overseas and, if they are retired, need to bring money in from time to time to cover living costs or make major purchases like property or cars from taxed income for which they may not have documentation to qualify for tax credits, if these are available. So this will end up as a remittance tax for foreigners at rates going up to 35%. That is the reverse of capital controls which apply a withholding tax to stop money being sent out of a country. You would think they would want to be encouraging capital inflows for private consumption and investment, not taxing them away. Of course Thai traders are very unhappy to be asked to pay tax on stock trade earnings but they will at least have untaxed gains to pay tax on as few countries charge capital gains on non-residents. Dividends are a different matter and they may be double taxed on dividends from some countries. The case of these class Thais is quite different because they will be taxed on their gains and dividends, not on their savings.

I think it quite likely that the real estate lobby will push them to exempt tax resident foreigners who remit funds to buy a condo. If the agree to do that, they might require proof that the condo was actually purchased and the value was the same. Otherwise the foreigner condo market will be limited to buyers who don't live in Thailand and are just buying holiday homes or doing money laundering in the case of one group of foreigners. Even if they carved out an exemption for condo buyers, that would not help guys who want to remit cash to buy a piece of land and a house in the wife's name.

The DTAs assume it is possible to file for Thai tax using tax credits from DTA countries but the Thai PNG 90 and PNG 91 tax returns have no space to enter these tax credits. This seems to speak volumes about how many have actually declared overseas income from the previous year, under the current rule, for Thai taxes claiming overseas tax credits. Also about the state of preparedness of the RD to implement their new interpretation. However the RD is clearly going to want you to file in full, rather than tick a box saying "not applicable because of DTA" in the case the Thai tax would be higher in which case they could still collect something after deducting the tax credit. This is very likely since the threshold to pay Thai income tax is lower than most farang countries and foreigners are less likely to be able claim as much in allowances vs Thais, although the over 65 allowance is pretty good.

You would have to check with a bank on whether foreigners are prohibited from receiving offshore loans. I have heard more than once from bank fx officers who called to ask the purpose of a foreign remittance for reporting to the BoT that the only categories available for foreigners were, I think, living expenses and purchase of condo. When I convince them I was Thai they agreed to report as an offshore loan. The reporting is quite informal now but in the past you had to go to the bank and fill out a form for more than US$20k. That was when I got follow up calls from the BoT on how the sericing of the debt was going and those were loans to a Thai company, although I have booked personal offshore loans to myself (as a Thai). I was able to repay the company offshore loans with loan agreements the bank didn't look at but haven't tried to repay the personal loans. Anyway I think it would be important to have an entity or another person remit the loan to Thailand or they could just argue it was not a loan but you were remitting income earned abroad. Loan documents can be self drafted following any template on the internet. You can add terms to make the loans bullet repayment, meaning all the interest is rolled up and paid at the end to explain why no interest payments. You can also add terms to say the loan can be rolled over indefinitely at the discretion of the lender after a 10 year term or something.

The UK state pension is specifically taxable only in the UK under the double tax treaty. So the answer is no but private pensions you probably have to pay Thai tax and claim a tax credit for tax deducted in the UK. But, if they get serious on this, they might require you file a tax return anyway to show you have exempted income. No one can say what nonsense they will think up. They are completely incompetent and don't bother to think anything through at the Revenue Dept and Srettha and his team.

Surprised he doesn't do the same as UK ministers and appoint his girlfriend as special advisor who goes on trips with him and leave the old boot at home.

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.