chiang mai

"Your tax residency status in Thailand is irrelevant. Only your wife has remitted the funds to Thailand , these funds are a gift, and non assessable and tax exempt". Nope, I read what you wrote, which is why I wrote: "The posters tax residency in Thailand is highly relevant, depending on where the gift is made, in Thailand or overseas".

What I would do is to start with Por 161/162 and try to separate the funds in my home country between income earned prior to 31 December 2023 and everything else. That will leave you with two pots of money, not assessable and potentially assessable. I would then look at the relevant DTA to determine what parts of the assessable pot can be moved across to not assessable, ie, exempt funds by treaty......ditto with any income. Eventually you should end up with two fairly clearly defined pots which should allow you some latitude in knowing what you can remit and what needs some attention/research. Perhaps there will be a third pot also, funds that are unclear Some unclear issues at present seem to include the TRD handling of capital gains and commingled funds so real estate sales needs some research, as do market investments, eg equities and bond funds.

The posters tax residency in Thailand is highly relevant, depending on where the gift is made, in Thailand or overseas. If tax resident in Thailand and the gift is made here, there is a risk, depending on the nature of the funds that are remitted, that they may be assessable here, on him.

It's great to have principles RW but you've got to be sensible. NOBODY in Thailand, least of all the TRD, cares whether you think taxes are fair and just or not and you have zero voice to influence them. So you have two choices, follow the rules or leave. I mean, what are you gonna do, write to your Congressman, demonstrate, start a petition, with hold taxes in protest etc etc!

It depends solely on whether you remit funds that are assessable to tax in Thailand or whether they are exempt in some way. The rules on Gift Tax in your home country are not really relevant, all the TRD cares about is the status of the funds you bring into Thailand.

The issues that I see are: a) will the TRD accept the money is a gift and not regard it as income for your wife. I think the above is fairly straight forward in that they will accept it is a gift, if you do all the things you have mentioned. b) will the TRD regard your remittance to your wife as taxable upon you, depending on whether or not the funds were assessable or not. If the funds were tax exempt or otherwise not assessable to Thai tax, e.g savings. point (b) is not an issue. But if they are assessable, there is a very very big question mark over whether TRD will allow you to escape tax on an overseas remittance, simply by gifting those funds. As far as the gift tax element is concerned, you appear to be doing all the right things by documenting the gift and formalising the arrangement.

Simply because the TRD has not said exactly how they will handle DTA rules from every country, for every type of income, until they tell us, nobody can tell you. Suggest you wait until November (ish) when new tax forms and instructions are supposed to be released.

Most expats, as in the majority? Can you substantiate that claim? I presume you have written what you did, in order to justify not living in Thailand and to demonstrate how smart you are and how stupid everyone else is!

If the gifter was not Thai tax resident when the gift was made, that would work better. Even better if the gift was made entirely overseas and then brought into Thailand when by the receiver of the gift.

The line between tax evasion and tax avoidance is often blurred but the onus remains on you to prove what you've declared on the tax return, the TRD doesn't have and wont have to defend anything. If you haven't declared anything and haven't filed a tax return, the TRD will simply ask you why not and what funds are you living on. A forensic audit of the account that you tell them will reveal cash in and out and require explanation and receipts, lest they think it might be money from an illegal activity. If you say you don't have an account and everything is in cash, expect the gates of h*ll to open up and swallow you because no Revenue service likes that answer, simply because nothing is verifiable. That means they will keep digging into your affairs as deep as they can, until they get fed up, at which point they will estimate the tax you owe based on life style and present you with a bill. You may well be bringing money in by cash every few months but that's likely to cost you more in airfare than the tax that would have been cheaper to pay so a rational person probably wouldn't go that route! Assuming that's what you tell them, along with your border casino winnings, they will ask you to prove it, show us receipts for accomodation, travel expense etc etc because now the focus of their attention has shifted to whether you are working here illegally. I don't think you understand how Revenue Departments can and do operate. They are highly unlikely to be interested in broadly normal returns where there is some form of proof but the further away from normal that you are, the riskier it becomes. Most worrying in your case is that you think the government has to prove a case, they don't, you have to disprove what the decide upon. If you think that standing in front of a tax tribunal judge on the last day of the investigation, arguing that you don't really owe 500k in estimated tax, just because you've been operating a cash based accounting system and have no receipts or proof, is going to save you, you may wish to read up on customary practice and reasonability tests. You will not have been the first person to try and walk down that road, they will have seen and heard it all before, many times. You may think you are sharper than them, trust me, you aren't.

You keep saying this but fail to understand, ONLY is they use non-assessable income.

I think the information that was documented in the Tax Guide is about as good as it gets, I don't see that anyone has been able to substantially add to it that albeit a few people have tried successfully to confuse it! I absolutely bet the farm on the receiver of the Gift, not being taxed under the threshold as long as the rules are followed. And I bet the farm and the ranch on the Gifter being taxed, if the gifted funds were assessable and the gift was made from inside Thailand whilst the gifter was tax resident.

FWIW I think an AVERAGE spend of 65k per month across all long stay visa holders is far too high.

Calm down! The point is that Thailand is constantly going through these periods of change where property doesn't sell, tourists don't come blah blah blah. I've lived here full time for over 21 years and part time for almost thirty, that change is a feature of the landscape and the country somehow, always manages to come out better.

BAU....Business As Usual, nothing to see here, move along.

Sure, Thailand is constantly evolving, when one nationality fails to present large numbers of tourists, TAT goes after another country to provide them. When motorbike rental shops saturate the market, people open coffee shops, after that laundrettes....remember internet cafe's here! Today it's grab delivery or courier services and selling via the internet. When one door closes, another opens.....people here Are more flexible and willing to try new things in order to survive, because there's mp nanny state to fall back on.

Anecdotal, nothing more.

I see the number differently. The 300,000 Western foreigners comprises 170,000 working expats on WP's, according to the 2019 UN migration report, those people earn money inside the country and pay tax on it. The remainder are retired or long stay expats who remit money here from overseas. 130,000 x 65k month. / 35 baht per USD = 241 bill or 5% of GDP, I think that's very small in the bigger picture of things.

Well, at a minimum it was enforced for some visa groups in 2012, according to the BP, and that was only little more than a decade ago. The remittance law was slightly different, that was a legal reinterpretation of the rule rather than activation of a rule that had been dormant. But still, reactivating TCC's and making them a requirement for most people, could be accomplished overnight. I'm beginning to think a system whereby the 800k/400k is used as a guarantee that taxes have/will be paid might be doable, it more closely mirrors what WP holders have at present by their employer guaranteeing the same thing.

You may be bored and lonely and want somebody to fight with but I have no such need so welcome to my ignore list. Byee.

I wrote that, "I can guarantee you that there is some mechanism in place to ensure the TRD receives the taxes that are due, before the expat taxpayer leaves the country and goes home, absolutely guarantee".

Don't be a <deleted> Rolf, we're trying to work out how the process works! I said earlier that I guaranteed there had to be some way the TRD was guaranteed its taxes, before the taxpayer left the country and there is broadly is. The responsibility for taxes is transferred to the employer who becomes the taxpayer's proxy. That makes sense because the employer remains here hence they don't care if the taxpayer leaves or not. But you can't overlay that model onto non-WP holders because there is no proxy to take responsibility for paying their tax, unless some form of guarantee were to exist, which is where the 400k/800k could potentially prove useful.

Well, until somebody explains chapter and verse of what happens, that's what we have to do is guess! But once again, the guarantee that taxes will be paid is transferred to the employer, not the WP holder.

I don't know, that's why I asked. I know some people work as freelance or self employed status and pay their own taxes but I don't know if you can do that on a WP - I used to do that in Europe and Asia. So you work, your employer pays your tax directly to the TRD and then what, you file a tax return at the end of the year to settle up? I guess in that scenario the TRD doesn't care if you leave or not, they probably even hope that you do so they don't have to deal with your tax return. The check and balance in that set up is the employer is on the hook to deduct and pay the tax so that's the guarantee. You were made redundant and nothing was said about settling taxes because your employer had already done that.....I wonder if you filed a tax return that year to reclaim tax paid?

Did the company you work for pay TRD your taxes?