K2938

It is actually in the text of the new Thai Elite application agreement which was posted there as well as follows:

According to a fb post, the Thai Elite visas now also have an application fee of 50 000 THB. If your application is not approved, you will lose this money. Only in case of approval will it be credited towards the total visa fee.

There was a recent seminar at AMCHAM in Bangkok where it was stated that Thailand does plan to track credit/debit card use. Posted somewhere higher up in the maybe ten last pages of this thread

While this is a very creative argument, I can virtually guarantee you that the Thai Revenue Department will NOT agree with this.

While the Thai tax authorities will not get the older data automatically, they can ask for it from most tax jurisdictions in case of need based on various mutual assistance agreements. So if they find something which makes them want to investigate, they will in most cases be able to do so. The data will just not be received automatically.

Just time your move to Thailand such that in your first year you will be in Thailand less than 180 days.

I trust the Thai prime minister also pointed out to Hong Kong investors that to further increase the investment attractiveness of Thailand there will be a 35% tax on most remittances which is particularly nice for Hong Kong investors where taxes are extremely low in general and capital gains are not taxed at all. So all these investors will surely appreciate to lose 35% of their investment even before it has started.????

It gets even worse than this. While the Thai tax authorities have not really much focused on remittances from foreigners in the past, they of course will do now. And in the course of complaining about your transfers in 2024, they will then probably also ask you a lot of questions about transfers you made in the past and also start complaining about those because maybe they were not really tax-free according to their logic even under the old tax regime. And they can demand back taxes from you for up to 10 years. So this will be real fun.

Why would that be? As of now based on all what has been announced there would be absolutely no exemption for this. So if it is a taxable remittance, than it is taxed regardless of what you do with the money. And if not, then not. But just buying a car or condo does not change this.

There appear to be two things to differentiate: (1) The time at which the money is remitted to Thailand: The new tax law interpretation indeed only covers remittances made on or after Jan 1, 2024. (2) The other thing however is the time the foreign income arose, i.e. not when it was remitted, but when it arose. According to the Thai language Q&A from the Thai Revenue Department on the new tax law interpretation from a few days ago the link to which is posted higher up in this or the general tax thread it would appear that this is NOT limited to income which only arose on or after Jan 1, 2024.

The UK and various former colonies of the UK or countries with a legal system in the UK tradition for example have remittance taxation for certain non-domiciled, but tax resident individuals. You can google on the internet. Somewhere higher up in this or the LTR thread I also as an example posted a link to some of the rules from the UK which can give you an indication of how complex things might become.

Well, some other countries having remittance taxation do. So I am not saying that it necessarily will be like this, but this is a real possibility. We will see.

If you are a UK resident, I think the limit is 30k GBP (https://wise.com/help/articles/2899986/what-are-my-spending-limits), but I might be wrong. And regarding the Wise transfers broken down into less than 50k THB, I would directly transfer this to Thai Elite, omitting the step via your Thai bank account, but maybe you have other reasons for this. Good luck!

Thank you. Does anybody actually have the entire presentation of the AMCHAM event on this which could be most useful? AMCHAM Tax Committee: Thai Tax on Foreign-Sourced Income - Oct 4; https://www.amchamthailand.com/2023/10/05/tax-committee-thai-tax-on-foreign-sourced-income/ ) The screenshot on their website is only of one slide. Thank you.

Regarding Wise: The maximum card payment limit depends on your country of residence. So while many people have reported paying by the Wise card without any problem, this might well not apply to you. However, you can always pay by Wise directly, i.e. without using the Wise card. To apparently make life as difficult as possible for most applicants, the bank chosen by Thai Elite does only allow a maximum transfer of 49999 THB per transaction. What many people have therefore reported successfully doing is splitting up the total payment into the necessary amount of smaller payments below 50k and then sending a pdf of all the payment receipts to Thai Elite. They all say that Wise is cheaper than SWIFT, but it really depends on the conditions of your commercial bank. The cheapest way - even cheaper than Wise - is probably paying via a Visa or Mastercard from a commercial bank which does not add any foreign exchange fees on top of the Visa/Mastercard rates and where you have a sufficient credit limit to make this transaction. Not many people however have this and if this is really cheaper than Wise will also depend on your home country currency.

I agree with this. But most LTR visa holders are pensioners who have already lived here on other visas for ages and just switched, so their situation is frequently probably rather different. And then you still have the currently not yet clear issue of how mixed funds are treated.

Could work or not depending on how far back they look and how mixed funds are treated. So while holding a LTR visa if offshore you put 98 in a short-term bond fund which you then sell at 100 and then remit this to Thailand, then the 2 (100-98) is certainly tax free because it is foreign income while holding a LTR visa. But what about the 98 which is income from prior years where you did not hold an LTR visa? Is this now also "cleaned" or not. That is currently not clear at all.

Feel free to read what is written here and in the general foreign remittance tax thread and you will get a better understanding.

There is indeed a remittance tax benefit of the LTR visa, but since it appears to only apply to earnings which have arisen while holding the LTR visa, the benefit is probably not so great. Moreover, it is still entirely unclear how mixed funds will be treated and mixed funds will be the category in which most prior earnings/savings probably will be for most people which could make bringing any prior money into Thailand a nightmare. Probably things are taxable unless you can prove otherwise and the proving otherwise could be extremely difficult/impossible in many or even most instances. If it is concerning current salary, then the benefit is clearly there, but most LTR visa holders do not work.

Thailand planning to monitor foreign credit card transactions for circumvention of foreign remittance tax according to AmCham presentation

This wonderful new remittance tax rule will also have a very negative effect on the private hospital sector in Thailand. Because for anything where there is no top urgency for Thai tax residents hit with remittance tax like major planned surgery it now makes a lot more sense to get this done in Malaysia or Singapore with direct payment from offshore funds instead of going to a Thai hospital where there would be an additional 35% remittance tax on top of the amount invoiced.

@Lorry Thank you so much for your tremendously useful translation of the Q&A on the proposed remittance tax changes from the Thai Revenue Department. Highly appreciated!

Thank you for posting this. This appears to be potentially very useful. Thank you for drawing everybody's attention to this. Unfortunately, Google Translate seems to have a big problem in translating many parts of this document intelligibly, but hopefully somebody who speaks Thai well on this forum can look at the document and translate.

If you are interested in this issue, then feel free to read what I was referring to (which was also published by the BOI only a few days ago) and you will see the subtle, but tax wise very important distinctions. Would be inefficient to discuss this all over again if it is already all in these threads

Not true according to the extremely narrow interpretation of the law put forward by the BOI themselves which you can read about higher up either in this thread or the LTR thread