Dogmatix

Not mentioned is the government also effectively decriminalised possession of small quantities of cocaine, heroin and ecstacy at the same time as the 5 speed pills. Unfortunately Thaksin is the 400 lb gorilla sitting in the corner. He has pulled off a skillful coup after losing the election and now calls the shots. He has a bee in his bonnet over drugs due to his son's out of control fondness for various high so substances when he was PM. He is no doubt pushing for complete recriminalisation of everything. Apart from that he is a dead weight damaging the Thai socio economic structure and development. His cupboard is bare now. He had some reasonable ideas in the beginning like universal healthcare. Then came the disastrous rice pledging and now the digital wallet. A real liability for Thailand.

I just completed my PND 90 tax return online as well as the wife's a few days ahead of the 9 April deadline for online filing (the deadline for paper filing was 31 March. I have filed hers separately this year, as she started earning enough of her own money to make it worthwhile. I used to file jointly. I will get a tax refund of nearly 450k and the wife will get a small tax refund too. That is more than we paid in withholding tax due to the way taxes on Thai sourced dividends are calculated to recognise that they are paid out of already taxed corporate income,. The process is not particularly user friendly towards farangs. I would say you a need pretty good knowledge of Thai and how Thai personal income tax works to even bother trying. You need to get everything prepared before you start and be ready to do the whole thing in one sitting. Otherwise you are likely to get logged out and have to key most of the data in from scratch. Nowadays there is a lot that is filled in automatically due to e-filings which get linked to the individual taxpayer. Most of my charitable donations and the wife's insurance premiums were already up there and dividends on Thai stocks can be downloaded directly from the share registry. Possibly the RD will eventually be able to pre-load all overseas remittances to personal accounts and let the taxpayer deduct DTA tax credits. But that is probably many year away.

Generally the hookers do very well in casinos. It's lucky that Thailand has copious capacity and won't need to import any, except for specialties like Russians etc. Places like Sri Lanka need to import hookers for their casinos and guess what country to they turn to - the LOS of course. The girls will be happy to work the casino gig at home in stead.

This is correct. One of the expat tax advisors who also sells investment services scared people in his webinar which is on YouTube by saying that the Thai RD already receives detailed quarterly reports in Excel format of credit and debit card payments and ATM withdrawals from foreign banks and credit card issuers on all Thai tax residents, regardless of whether the payments are in Thailand or elsewhere. This is a pure of invention by him for what reason it is hard to fathom. I think it will be hard or impossible for the RD to isolate foreign ATM and card payments by Thai tax residents, at least initially. Also I doubt they would even try at this point. In future, perhaps it will become easier.

I made a general comment on the situation as I see it which I believe is entirely appropriate in an open forum such as this one. Of course I have no idea what the poster's detailed personal financial situation is because he didn't disclose it and I have no interest in knowing it or commenting on it in detail. But at any rate, no one really knows how the RD is going to handle foreign pensions, probably not even the RD.

The Thai bureaucrats and politicians don't care. The Thai Revenue Code has always said anyone who spends more than 180 days in the Kingdom is a Thai tax residents and liable to pay Thai income tax, regardless of nationality or benefits they think they get from the tax. Many Thais are also not happy with how their tax money is spent and it is very clear that much of it is wasted or outright stolen but nothing they can do about it. Most can't leave like you can.

Yes. Most likely you will need to pay the difference, if the Thai tax is more than the UK tax. But they haven't clarified that yet and maybe never will, nor have they clarified what documentation will be acceptable to claim tax credits for tax already paid, assuming tax credits can be deducted and they don't force you to pay full Thai tax and try and reclaim what has been paid elsewhere. Thai bureaucrats would like tax receipts certified by a government but you will never get that from HMRC. They won't ever respond to a request for that. Also, bear in mind the tax years are out of synch with the UK being 6 April to 5 April and Thailand being 1 Jan to 31 Dec. So you, if you remit your pensions to Thailand monthly, you will not have anything to show you paid tax on remittances from May to December when you file your Thai tax. To date there is nowhere on the Thai tax return form to claim a tax credit and the forms are only in Thai. There are translations for guidance only but they are usually inaccurate. I have found the translation to omit new item, e.g. the new tax return may have added an item 17 in Thai but the English translation finishes at item 16 because they just cut and paste the previous year's one without adding the update. You can go along to RD offices with you information and ask the ladies there to fill in your tax return for you but God help you, if you live in the sticks and they are only used to doing tax returns for rice merchants and the like.

Problem is that Thaksin is the one calling the shots and he wants it recriminalized. Srettha has no power, so it doesn't matter what he thinks. Anutin is unhappy about it but pleased with his money making opportunities and power at the Interior and also jockeying for position in the casino project.

It is not believable that this was not a deliberate attack. The cars were unmistakable and the journey was cleared with the IDF in advance. The IDF and Israeli government have an extremely wide credibility gap. Anything they say about this sort of thing should be assumed to be a lie, until proved otherwise.

Of course, the history of Palestine and Israel began only 7 Oct.

No need to worry about Big Joke. His father was the police driver for Thaksin's father-in-law and Thaksin is now back in power and looking for a new police chief available to start in October.

"Murderers" in the title is a bit of an exaggeration. The men who were convicted of the murders would be more accurate. The murderers are still at large on Murder Island.

Nice pic. Is that the view from the waterfront condos in Gaza that Jared Cushner and Ivanka Trump are going to develop?

Some people think the mighty merkava looks better being towed away as a blackened hull with a hole punched in the weak spot near the engine compartment by a Yasin RPG. It's purely a matter of taste.

I hope that police call centre gang will get the message and stop trying to call me within 30 days.

Yes, but why did they start it and who decided to leave the border undefended after receiving credible warnings from Egypt and their own troops at the border?

There has not been exactly fulsome condemnation of Israel's atrocities by Western governments either (even though there has been by the populations they claim to represent). So let's just call that evens.

Also never forget that the state of Israel was created by Jewish terrorists like Menachim Begin and his Stern Gang who indiscriminately murdered British soldiers and blew up the King David Hotel with hundreds of Jewish folk in it as collateral damage.

Most have already condemned the atrocities and war crimes committed by Hamas but now they have been eclipsed by the far more numerous atrocities and war crimes committed by Israel.

I'm not sure what would be the point of a locked thread. No one would able to point out anything that is misleading or incorrect. Anyway isn't the purpose of a forum like ASEAN NOW to encourage members to comment and debate topics? There are other places on the Internet where static Thai tax guides produced by professional tax advisors can be found. Describing other forum members as "irritations" and hindrances to developing a thread doesn't seem to be in the spirit of an open forum community.

Funding a hand out equivalent to 3% of GDP is just a mere detail.

It seemed to me that what they were trying to do was give some limited tax concessions to Thai companies issuing tokens as an alternative to issuing shares. In addition to VAT exemption they offered a flat rate of 15% on distributions made to token holders which would be like dividends which are taxed at a 10% flat rate. Interest is also subjected to a withholding tax of 15% but it is not a flat rate tax in as much as you have to declare interest earned over 20k and it will taxed at your top marginal tax rate, if this is more than 15% with the withholding tax used as a tax credit. There is a different treatment for dividends in respect of which you can choose to accept the 10% withholding tax and leave it at that without having to pay any more than that but you may claim tax back on the basis of getting a tax credit for the withholding tax and the corporate income tax paid by the company using a slightly complicated formula. The idea for distributions of income to holders of company tokens seems to be that they can accept the 15% withholding tax and don’t have declare it and pay more, if their top tax rate is over 15% but can’t claim a credit for tax paid by the company issuer of the token. in the case of onshore crypto traded there is withholding tax of 15% on gains from a 2016 Royal Decree that has never been implemented because the coup government issued the decree without thinking how this law could be implemented. But anyway the idea was that you had to pay more tax, if your top tax rate was over 15%. That means that you have to declare your gains on a PND 91 tax returns and pay tax on them. If it is a gain on crypto overseas, you pay tax on the gain earned after 1 Jan 2024, if you remit it to Thailand but not otherwise. Thailand has no specific capital gains tax. So you have to lump it in with your income and pay tax at up to 35%.

I was looking the Thai tax treatment of cryptos and there is a 2018 Royal Decree introducing a 1% withholding tax on gains from crypto. Looking into the website of Bitkub, the largest Thai crypto exchange I note that they say that 6 years down the track the 15% withholding tax has yet to be implemented and that the RD has so far not required Thai crypto exchanges to report any information to them about client accounts and trading. So declaring profits on onshore exchanges for PIT remains an honours system for the time being. The 15% withholding tax on crypto gains looks another tax innovation that wasn't thought through before it was enacted. Since crypto traders can transfer their coins to their own hard wallets and buy on one exchange and sell on another, it would need some sort of surveillance system to track the purchases and prices and figure out a FIFO or LIFO accounting system to establish the precise gains to apply the 15% tax to. My sense is that implementing a withholding tax on onshore crypto gains via a bona fide Royal Decree where they have total control over the exchanges should have been child's play compared to implementing the sea change in taxation of foreign source income introduced by an arguably unlawful reinterpretation by a bureaucrat, rather than by act of parliament or Royal Decree, with no supporting regulations or guidelines (how can you issue regulations pursuant to a non-law?) involving complex DTAs and massive differences in foreign tax regimes and tax years. The similar non-domicile tax on remittances from overseas in the UK is supported by proper statutory law and pages and pages of supporting regulations covering every imaginable scenario. Another interesting aspect in comparison is that Thai crypto traders must be overwhelmingly in Bangkok and major cities and most are probably relatively well versed in finance and Thai taxation matters. In contrast the new remittance tax will bring foreigners living up and down the country into the tax net for the first time, including many living in rural districts. Most of them have little or no clue about Thai tax and the RD officers in many districts also have no clue about foreign taxation or DTAs.

I just noticed that the director-general of the RD only joined the RD in October just after the previous D-G lumbered us with P. 161/2566 as his swan song and possibly the last order he signed. The new D-G, who was completely new to the RD, signed P. 162/2566 as damage limitation soon after her arrival on 20 November. That may not make any difference to us but, at least, it provides her with a let out to blame her predecessor for not thinking it through, if she decides to amend it or scrap it in the event that it proves unworkable or faces legal challenges. There is something else of interest about the new D-G here. https://www.thaipbsworld.com/two-senior-finance-ministry-officials-under-suspicion-for-insider-trading/ . Of course this tiny soupçon of impropriety is not considered an obstacle to promotion to head up one of the most important and most lucrative departments in the Finance Ministry. In fact, it may be considered a positive qualification by her direct boss, who is, of course, Khun Srettha. https://www.rd.go.th/english/34772.ht

I also get calls from a well spoken Thai woman in English saying she is with Amex and wants to sell me personal accident insurance. Very annoying if Amex has sold my personal data which I believe is the case as they more or less admitted that it once when I called to complain. The calls stopped for a bit but started again and always the same woman. I am polite with her as she is polite. Just tell her I am not interested.