Arkady

Glad to see these were all voluntary renunciations.

They have told the media they will prevent shops selling fried flower but there is nothing about that in the draft bill. I searched the word flower in Thai and nothing. No questions about that from shop owners and growers in the public hearing at the ministry either. Perhaps it is something that will come later in ministerial regulations they don't need to get through parliament.

It seems that being a Thai citizen makes you more likely to get on the radar of Thai call centre gangs operating from Cambodia or other locations. I was targeted by one a few days ago. It was the fake police scam claiming to be investigating money laundering and drug smuggling. They had my full name and ID card number in addition to my mobile number and claimed I had made a transaction with a named Thai person on a specific date in October and asked me to jot down a case number. I hung up at that point, having decided it was a scam, as the guy kept ignoring my insistence that he give me his name, rank and department, so I could check the fixed line number and call him back. They kept on calling for a few hours and more sporadically over the next couple of days using 06 mobile numbers which I didn't answer and immediately blocked them. I did pick up one more time when they used a different prefix and it was a different voice but obviously the same gang. I didn't speak and immediately blocked the number. My personal data could have come from an employee selling lists of personal data from any number of sources, including banks, credit card companies or any government office that has personal data plus phone number. Be warned. They make themselves sound quite scary and the background noise of the call centre could easily pass for a cop shop.

Yes. A PR's 13 digit ID number, which remains the same, if he upgrades to citizenship, should be used as his TIN. However, in cases where they or their company continue to use their old foreigner TIN, it doesn't seem to cause a problem. As a PR I filed for tax under my 13 digit number for years. Then I moved to a company that ignored me when I told them to use my TIN. They applied for a new foreigner TIN for me and insisted on using that the 3 years I worked there. I filed my tax return under my 13 digit number as usual submitting the documentation from the company with the foreigner number. The RD had no problem with this.

This has been posted before but probably not everyone has seen it. There was a detailed proposal under the first Thaksin government to merge the MOI departments that handle citizenship and PR together with the two SB citizenship departments (one for naturalisation and one for wives of Thai citizens) and the PR desk at CW that handles applications. As you would expect, it was resisted by the police tooth and nail and one of the arguments apparently fielded was that police couldn't bear to give up their police ranks (and parachute wings and medal ribbons too I guess) and become ordinary civil servants. So it got shot down or whoever was pushing it ran our of time in office. As you know, the the 1967 ministerial regulations pursuant to the 1965 Nationality Act were revised last year, following a cabinet resolution in January 2022, and included a plan to kick SB out of the process completely and take it all in house at the MOI. For reasons that have not been disclosed the new ministerial regulations were not issued before the Prayut government that commissioned them left office - possibly due to the impracticality of setting MOI facilities for application in each province, as called for in the draft regulations. It is a rough guess that, if the current minister and team ever get around to looking at this issue, they will probably want to go ahead and put the entire citizenship process under the MOI to have total control over it. The problem of provincial applications can be easily solved by having an office in Bangkok or Lamlukka handle applications nationwide in the same way as CW handles nationwide applications for PR. There is huge inefficiency in the current system, e.g. why does SB need two citizenship departments when both of them are under worked? Also there is the problem of lack of communication between SB and the MOI which looks down on the police and often leaves them guessing. Personally I hope for future applicants that the current government doesn't get around to looking at the citizenship issue and doesn't make any changes to the process. Intuition tells me that any changes would be for worse. Nearly in 2008 that allowed males with Thai wives to apply without PR. However, that was forced on an extremely reluctant MOI establishment by lawmakers intent on eliminating gender discrimination in the law (they succeeded only partially.) My advice to anyone already qualified is not to procrastinate, as whatever happens to the regulations and SB's involvement, it is only likely to get harder.

Sounds like a mistake. Unless something has changed since I last did it before becoming a citizen, you should have the multi in your passport. I just double checked my old passport. You better go back to CW and get it corrected.

You need 3 full tax years (1 Jan to 31 Dec) to qualify for both citizenship (with a Thai spouse) and PR, assuming you make the other qualifications. PR has a specific application time which is announced annually and usually runs till the year end but I think you can apply at the end of your third year and submit tax return in the New Year. Citizenship is open for application any time. So you can apply after submitting your tax return for the 3rd year. So, if you keep working continuously you will make the the 3 year qualification end 2024. For more info on PR see the AN Camerata PR thread.

One day the red book and the blue/white books will be replaced by smart card. This will upset people whose job it is to issue these pointless documents. When will this happen? Could be next year or 20 years hence. Is Anutin the man to shake things up? Probably not, or if he does it might not be to the advantage of PR holders, given his remarks about foreigners during COVID.

Looking at Anutin's monologues in media about drawing up a hit list of mafiosi appointed for reasons unknown as kamnans and pooyai baan at the Interior Ministry, gun control and other hot button issues, I found my mind a wandering to what he might do to the citizenship application process, if anything. The stage is set for him to make major changes, if he has a mind to do so, as a result of the failure of the Prayut government to issue the new ministerial regulations they ordered the ministry to draw up. We will have to see but something tells me that applicants will be better off, if he never turns his attention to this issue during his tenure.

That is BTS's racist policy I am afraid. Even as a Thai citizen they tried to refuse me, on the grounds of being not Thai in the eyes of the idiotic girl on the desk. I had to cause a fuss and let an angry queue build up behind me. I refused to budge from the queue and she refused to back down, so I suggested that, in the interests of the other passengers waiting, she might like to call her supervisor. He arrived in seconds and ticked her office roundly, saying, "He is Thai. Give him the senior ticket NOW". She went bright red at the loss of face. I still can't imagine what she thought she was trying to prove.

I think what happened with your HR lady was similar to what happens with lawyers and agents. They quote huge fees, claiming that a large element is bribes for Immigration and maybe the MoI too but it is unlikely that they pay more than about 30k of it to CW Immigration, if anything. They have very little decision making power and can't speed things up. It is unlikely that they pass anything higher up the chain than the front office CW staff, as it is much harder for them to get access and the applications go through a committee which makes it obvious to the others, if someone is getting favorable treatment.

Interesting but no mention of the potential impact on the condo market, particularly in resort areas where there are hardly any Thai buyers and the developers have to cook up dubious schemes to sell foreigners the 51% that is supposed to be owned by Thais. Surely there are a number of foreign condo buyers who actually live in Thailand most of the year? They are obligated to remit the money for the purchases which could be taxable at 35% now. I am surprised the condo developers remain silent, as their train speeds on towards a brick wall.

I think it is fair to assume that they will do this in the not too distant future. They already demand evidence of tax payment of employee and company for renewal of NON-B visas from what I recall. Also they may well raise the monthly amounts and lump sum. Under the first Thaksin regime they were raised substantially when he first came to power in 2001 (I think the lump sum was raised from 200k, so 4x). If you have already been in the country long enough for file a tax return and pay tax, there would be a logic to this for sure. Some double tax treaties allow the country of residence to collect tax and make the taxpayer try to claim a refund of tax already deducted in the other jurisdiction. Others will allow the taxpayer to claim a tax credit for tax already deducted in the country of origin. If you are earning the minimum required for renewal, currently 65k a month, you are way above the threshold that requires you to do a Thai tax return. So Immigration could easily ask for a certified copy of your prior year tax return. The current forms have a space to declare foreign income but I don't think there is anywhere you can claim a tax credit under a foreign DTA.

Before COVID Chinese buying of condos had become a huge chunk of the developers' market and has apparently been creeping back since the Chinese have been allowed to travel again. China has a double tax treaty with Thailand but it seems only to address corporate tax payers, not individuals. Perhaps China was only concerned about its state owned enterprises at the time. Anyway most of the money is assumed to be earned in the black economy in China and wouldn't benefit from a DTA. So for any Chinese who spends over 180 days a year in Thailand the idea of having to pay tax on money brought in to buy a condo would be a bit of of turn off. Even for those who spend less than 180 days in country, the idea of foreign remittances maybe getting screened for income tax liability could spoke the market completely. Also when you think of a typical expat farang arried to a Thai who wants to bring in a chunk of cash to buy a bit of landed property for his family to live in, they could also be put off. Their money is not even going directly into a real estate investment which might eventually be granted exemption from scrutiny. It is technically being gifted to his wife.

This new interpretation of the Revenue Code to mean ANY previous tax year, rather the apparent intent which was the THE previous tax year, gives rise to exactly that concern, since it appears to set no limit on how long ago that money was earned. Not only that the interest earned on the savings account going back indefinitely could also be deemed as taxable when remitted to Thailand. The Revenue Code doesn't specify income from property or real estate, as many of the translations suggest, but actually says income earned from assets overseas which could be any form of income generating asset. Furthermore there is no separate treatment of capital gains in the Revenue Code. So any capital gains, say from selling a house at any time in the past, could be taxed at progressive rates as income, if remitted to Thailand.

A well thought out and explained commentary but there are some potential issues. A2 There is a ruling for the RD's tax lawyers from the early 2000s that I can't lay my hands on for the moment to the effect that foreign pension income remitted to Thailand by Thai tax residents in the year it was earned was indeed deemed taxable income. The RD has done nothing to try to enforce this probably because it would be too much trouble and very little would be collected, since a great deal of the pensions would be covered by DTAs. That is still true but this idea doesn't seem very well thought through, so nothing can be said to be impossible. B Section 41 of the Revenue Code indeed appears to say that income earned abroad in the previous tax year is taxable when remitted to Thailand and that has always been the RD's interpretation until now. However, when you look at the Thai original and take into account that Thai has no definite or indefinite articles, you can see that see that it could be interpreted as income earned abroad in a previous tax year is taxable when remitted to Thailand. And that unfortunately appears to be the interpretation that Srettha as finance minister has instructed the RD to make. If you consider the intent, it seems that the previous interpretation was intended. That is a wordy language and makes up for vagaries like having no definite or indefinite articles by adding more phrasing for the avoidance of doubt, e.g. "in any previous tax year whatsoever". But the drafters didn't say that which implies they meant only the previous tax year for which you have to file a tax return. Some may say this interpretation is non-intuitive and is merely a sleight of hand tactic by the government to try to raise more revenue without the need to subject amendments to the Revenue Code to parliamentary scrutiny and test the unity of the marriage of convenience coalition. It could be that the new interpretation will be challenged in the tax court. D The exchange of information agreement is a concern in this context. I received a letter from the UK taxman accusing me of concealing income that had obviously come from a bank somewhere reporting a remittance. I had to pay my tax accountant to send them a letter explaining that I was a non-UK tax resident but regularly filed tax returns on UK sourced income. The same could easily happen in reverse in Thailand.

I was just browsing the British Embassy's website to advise a friend who needs a notarized passport copy (one of the few notary services they still offer) and came across this. Letter of no objection for a Thai citizenship application This service is available by post. It costs £75 plus a postage fee of £2. This letter is for British nationals making an application for Thai citizenship. To apply, follow the instructions in the Application Pack – Thai citizenship letter of no objection (ODT, 22.6 KB). A letter of no objection seems a far cry from what the MOI seems to want from embassies but, if the Brits have really persuaded them to accept that or left them with little choice, good for them. I wonder what the current version says, as there isn't a copy of the text in the information pack. The original letter, after they stopped doing the affidavits, was a sort of acknowledgement that the person in question was applying for Thai citizenship but pointed out that British citizens can have as many citizenships as they like and the government cannot force them to renounce citizenship. I guess this is the same in essence as a no objection letter. So the current text may be the same.

I sharpened it up as much as possible in Lightroom and translated it with the Google translate camera which did a better job of deciphering the characters than my own eyes but a not so good job of translating it. The second part must people who applied for naturalization, if the first part is foreign women who applied to adopt Thai husband's nationality. Foreign wives rejected looks like 300 and something but the number approved is obscured on the slide, although it looks to be a 4 digit number. Likewise applicants for naturalization is a undeterminable 4 digit number, while rejections looks like 459, not 555. No time period for these stats but it must be 10 years or more. What is surprising is the number of rejections, as we never hear of outright rejections and tend to assume that one the one hand, everyone who meets the qualifications passes, and that on the other hand SB is smart enough not to put up applicants who are unqualified. I still believe that the former is true but I would guess the tendency for the rejections are cases where SB let some slip through the net and/or applicants who become unqualified in between applying at SB and being interviewed, e.g. got divorced, became unemployed and WP was requested. This thread also probably has some survivorship bias, i.e. most of the posters are fully qualified and persistent enough to deal with the inevitable banana skins lobbed in their path.

I know a couple of Germans who are naturalised Thais. The procedure was to obtain permission to retain German nationality from foreign ministry in Berlin before you apply for Thai citizenship. You need to present what is considered a good reason. Historically they have accepted that an applicant needs Thai nationality to own his own business and/or land without the disadvantage of having to use a Thai nominee and, of course wishes to retain strong links with Germany and ultimately move back there, which is of course contradictory to the intent to remain permanently in Thailand when you apply for Thai nationality but that doesn't seem to matter. In the past AFAIK the German embassy has been willing to provide the affidavit about renouncing German nationality, even though the applicant has been given permission to actually retain German citizenship. You ought to check with the embassy that this is the case. Re your questions about the MOI doesn't ask for a renunciation certificate, as indeed Germany does from new German citizens who have not been given permission to hold dual nationality. I am sure they would love to ask for this but they cannot because it is not authorized in the Nationality Act which makes provision for revocation of Thai nationality of dual citizens in certain circumstances but makes no provision for forced renunciation of their other nationalities. So the MOI goes as far as it thinks it can without overstepping its authority under the Act which it fears could lead to law suits in the Administrative Court. A recent case where the MOI was sued for revoking Thai citizenship dragged on for 16 years and ended up with the ministry losing the case and having to reinstate a couple's Thai nationality. There are some powerful people who either have dual nationality or their children have which has historically prevented the MOI from having more specific and general prohibitions against dual amended into the Nationality Act. in 1992 the Act was in fact amended to allow the MOI to strip Thai nationality from luk krung, unless they renounced their other nationality between the ages of 20 and 21 and this happened under a military installed government without any public outcry in the media. But it was obviously very upsetting to a person or persons of consequence because the law was amended again only three weeks later to dilute the offending clause, so as to mean that luk krung had the right but the not the obligation to renounce Thai nationality at that age, if they wised to retain their other nationality, which some might choose to do, if they lived outside Thailand and were forced to do so to retain their other nationality. Very few countries actually check up on this and I can't recall seeing a single case in the RG. Asking for the affidavit was only introduced in 2009 and is not in the Act or ministerial regulations and therefore is potentially open to legal challenge. It is effective with nationalities that prohibit dual nationality because they inform the embassies once Thai citizenship is granted. Since a lot of the applicants are from China and India, this may have the effect of forcing those nationalities to renounce their birth citizenships, although I am not sure how strict China is over this.

I think the idea was send the file to the next stage at the MOI within 90 days after the applicant has signed the application. That covers the period the file is going around the narcotics agency and the NIA interview. That was what was in the flow chart on SB's website some years ago. So I assume they just rehashed it, except that SB would no longer be involved. Chula was not mentioned in the cabinet resolution but I saw the suggestion that Chula would be asked to help design the tests in an article somewhere but can no longer find it. It seems logical that an educational institute like Chula that has a course of Thai for foreigners would be involved but who knows what they will do when they get around to it. I think the dea of Por 6 was exempt applicants from language testing if they had graduated from Thai medium school at Por 6 or higher. It would be tempting to think that would include a pass in the Por 6 for foreigners exam, assuming it still exists, but I somehow doubt that would count because they have probably never heard of it. I presented my own Por 6 for foreigners certificate to SB, thinking they would very impressed and might even let me off the language testing. But they simply had no idea what it was, were unimpressed when I explained and I even had to push them to include a copy of it in my file.

It is interesting to note that there is hardly anything of consequence in the 1967 ministerial regulations that it took them the better part of two years to publish after the 1965 Nationality Act which probably meant no one could apply in that time. I think it also quite likely that most of the regulations were cut and paste from the previous ones pursuant to the previous nationality act, as indeed was the nationality act itself, but the new act specified that they had to be redrafted. What is significant in the 1967 regulations is the impractical system of requiring applications in the province of residence which the new draft regulations failed to address after 55 years of the chaos caused by that. They only took away the initial application processing away from SB and gave it to DOPA, which they perhaps believed might solve the problem in the provinces. The 1967 regulations also specified that the definition of knowledge of the Thai language is the ability to speak and understand it. The new draft regulations seemed to expand on that by requiring more rigorous testing but I think but am not certain that they stopped short of testing for reading and writing ability. It is odd that the regulations have not been regularly updated but we know that ministerial guidelines in 2009 added the requirement for the affidavit which has also been made somewhat impractical by the refusal of certain embassies to cooperate (understandable on their part). Ministerial guidelines, unlike ministerial regulations, are not published in the Royal Gazette and do not technically have the force of law. There was apparently no reference to the affidavit in the cabinet resolution or the draft ministerial regulations. Since the last government failed to get the draft ministerial regulations into the RG, we will have to wait and see what happens to them under the next government. Since the new interior minister was in the cabinet that resolved what should be in the regulations in January 2022, it could be that he will publish the draft that has already been written.

I attach a report of the cabinet resolution to draft new ministerial regulations in January 2021. Also the current 1967 ministerial regulations, the only ones ever published pursuant to the current 1965 Nationality Act. Here is something about DOPA gathering feedback on the draft regulations (nice to think that they bother with feedback) but the link is dead http://dopasakonnakhon.go.th/home/download/7868.html . Also an unrevealing memo on the same subject from the D-G of DOPA https://www.bora.dopa.go.th/wp-content/uploads/2022/10/mt030910_v26906.pdf. So the feedback gathering process may have taken a long time and not been completed before the election - or something. There were some more reports at the end of last year saying that there would be language testing arranged by DOPA in every province with advisory services from Chula but this sounds highly impractical, as some provinces rarely produce applicants. The obvious thing to do was to make it Bangkok only application, as in the case of PR but they didn't seem to want to do that. So it is now left to the MOI under the capable hands of Anutin, despite the fact that his BJP expressed little or policy ideas for local administration or any of the MOI's work in its election manifesto. So it will be a process of discovery what they plan to do. Ministerial regulations 11 Jan 2022.docx Ministerial regulations Nationality Act 1967.pdf

Let's hope for the best, as Jay says. Anutin's father, Chaovarat, was interior minister from 2008 to 2011, as a proxy for Anutin who was banned at the time. However, the BJP was still absolutely controlled by Newin (also banned at the time), who had done the deal with the military to have Abhisit take over as PM from Thaksin's brother-in-law. Chaovorat was a very nice man, well disposed towards farangs whom I had the privilege to play golf with once. However, there were not many approvals on his watch and there were allegations that he was not allowed to sign anything, including citizen approvals without Newin's permission. Even thought Newin is still regarded as the ultimate owner of BJP, Anutin is not beholden to him in the way his father was in those days, so things could go in any direction. We should also bear in mind that the new ministerial regulations (the first update since 1967) that were ordered in a cabinet resolution in around January 2022 never got published in the RG under the Prayut administration for reasons unknown, as it was announced they were ready in December 2022. The new minister could order them to be revamped, published as is or continue to leave them on ice.

The bureaucratic requirements for documentation are a bit irksome in Thailand and it takes a long time but his is true of many countries. My brother complained about the long wait for US citizenship and he had to have a green card first. They held on to his passport for some time while he was applying for citizenship, so he couldn't go on business trips without going through some rigmarole to get it back. They also held up his citizenship because a judge with a heavy foreign accent complained that he had shown no documentary evidence that he was fluent in English, despite being UK citizen and having graduated from British school and university. Germany has got easier but still harder than most other European countries and has the requirement to surrender non-EU citizenship which is no longer common in Europe. I was born in Germany at a time when most countries, including the UK and Thailand, gave citizenship automatically to anyone born there but Germany never did that. It might have been nice to have an EU passport post-Brexit.

I noticed someone replied to a post from 2007 on this issue of why would someone from a developed country apply for Thai citizenship. This is a fairly pointless discussion as it is pretty obvious that being a citizen of a country to which you have immigrated and intend to remain has many advantages, such as remaining indefinitely without immigration or WP hassles, owning your own business, owning your own land etc. I wouldn't say it's much easier for a Thai to get German citizenship than vice versa. I have the impression that German citizenship has traditionally been one of the most difficult in Europe to obtain and they will rarely allow naturalised citizens to retain their original nationality. Even the UK that was traditionally relatively easy has introduced a notoriously hard Life in Britain exam for Indefinite Leave to Remain which you have to obtain to be eligible for citizenship. In reality getting Thai citizenship is not that difficult for males working in Thailand but there is a lot of false mythology about how difficult it is and that you must have connections, Thai children, pay or bribe and such like. Mainly it just takes time and a lot of patience but everyone who is qualified normally gets it in the end.