TallGuyJohninBKK

Re the nonsence OP post in this thread, perhaps the answer to the question posed has something to do with the following: Now, more than 5 years after the arrival of COVID, we still have nearly 1,000 people-a-week dying of COVID in the United States, with the recent year-end spike shown below that has become commonplace with COVID. https://covid.cdc.gov/covid-data-tracker/#trends_weeklydeaths_select_00 The gray colored columns for the several more recent weeks not shown in the above chart are PARTIAL counts that will become final/blue colored columns in the chart once the counts for those weeks are finalized. The last blue column above for the week ending Jan. 11 is the latest finalized weekly count. From the footnotes section of the above CDC website: "Source: Provisional Deaths from the CDC’s National Center for Health Statistics (NCHS) National Vital Statistics System (NVSS). Provisional data are non-final counts of deaths based on the flow of mortality data in NVSS. Deaths include those with COVID-19, coded to ICD–10 code U07.1, as an underlying or contributing cause of death on the death certificate."

That PWC booklet said its 2023/24 info was based on Thai tax rules/laws as of July 2023, although it includes some reference to the first TRD change dated Sept. 2023. However in quickly perusing the front section on personal income tax: --It doesn't seem to say much if anything about the impact of double taxation treaties that may exist between Thailand and various expats' home countries -- which can serve to limit or exclude Thai taxation in various categories, and --It doesn't seem to make any mention at all of the subsequent clarification by the TRD (P162) that said all foreign income earned pre-2024 would be considered SAVINGS and thus not subject to Thai taxation, even if remitted into Thailand in later years. There seems clear agreement that the pre-2024 savings exception does cover any funds held in bank accounts as cash at the end of 2023. There's some disagreement, though, about whether the same tax exception also does or does not cover cash and stock holdings held in brokerage accounts up thru that time.

Crazy... insane on the TRD staff's part there.

FWIW, this YT video from a couple days ago by Integrity Legal is saying their contacts suggest there is no plan / intention within Thai Immigration to start making tax status certification a criteria for retirement extension approvals.

Interesting article I came across from back in 2020 on the same general subject: The Thailand Revenue Department launches a new service to directly share tax information with the Immigration Bureau December 16, 2020 "On November 18, 2020, the Revenue Department launched a new service to directly share the tax information listed below with the Immigration Bureau. The objective is to reduce paperwork and shorten the processing time for visa holders and companies to obtain officially certified copies of tax documents." https://eiglaw.com/the-thailand-revenue-department-launches-a-new-service-to-directly-share-tax-information-with-the-immigration-bureau/ I have no idea if their system from back then is still up and running, or what became of it post 2020.

Asked and answered! Just one example, from American tax advisor Thomas Carden in a recent interview: 2025-02 Carden - prospect for future TRD-Immigration integration, req to show tax clearance.mp4

Supposedly yes... not because of anything to do with a DTA necessarily, but because of the announced TRD policy to exempt savings that existed pre 12/31/23. Any interest it accrued up thru the end of 2023, to the extent it existed as of 12/31/23, also would be exempt.

There's some chatter, just chatter for the present, about the Thai government supposedly having some plan down the road to link Thai tax compliance with the issuance of visas/extensions of stay. That is NOT the case now, and AFAIK hasn't even been formally proposed anywhere public as yet. However, if that ever were to become a reality, it would be interesting to see how they'd intend on making that work when at least under the current rules, you can absolutely be a foreigner living in Thailand who has absolutely NO legal obligation to file a Thai tax return... chiefly because, you can have zero assessable income to report.

One of the interesting things about all this is... IF the TRD ever gets their act together on all this, supposedly, one of the first areas they're supposedly going to look at for potentially taxable foreign remittances will be incoming foreign wire transfers to foreigners here. In the case of Americans, many thousands living here have their monthly SS payments direct deposited into their Thai bank accounts. Hopefully, along the way, TRD and their tax enforcement will recognize that they need to disregard/ignore the incoming U.S. Social Security monthly payments, given that they are Thai tax exempt!

Before this year, most retired expats in Thailand whose only income was remitting foreign funds into Thailand rarely ever needed to file a Thai personal tax return. Now suddenly, the rules have changed somewhat, and suddenly, there are 61 or so Dual Taxation treaties that Thailand has with 61 or so other countries that can dictate what Thailand can and cannot tax for retired foreigners from those countries. To expect that peon TRD staff spread all over the country are suddenly going to become knowledgeable about the intricacies of many different tax treaties is a hill far too high to climb for a Thai government agency.

There's somewhat of a debate on whether those with ONLY exempt income are or are not required to file a return under the new rules for foreign remittances. There's probably more weight at present on the opinion that filing a Thai return for only exempt income is NOT required. Part of what feeds into that opinion and would seem to support it is that the current Thai tax forms for TY 2024 provide NO section / field for reporting exempt/non-taxable income. And, the RTD's own very sparse public guidance on foreign remittances has talked about the Thai tax only applying to ASSESSABLE foreign remittances. And exempt funds like U.S. SS are not assessable income and can ONLY be taxed by the U.S., per Article 20 of the U.S.-Thai DTA: https://www.irs.gov/pub/irs-trty/thailand.pdf

Speaking of TRD being a clusterf of ignorance, just saw this new thread elsewhere in the forum... Yikes!

Yep, you're absolutely correct. There are several very key issues where the advice from Carden's office and ETT are diametrically opposite, with both saying they're basing their advice on guidance they've received from TRD officials and/or attorneys. That's exactly why I wanted to ask Carden's office about the cash in the bank vs total account value issue. Because in all of the various Carden interview videos that I'd reviewed prior to going yesterday, he had NEVER used the same CASH only phrase that ETT has used repeatedly. FWIW, from what I've seen, there's also nothing in the language of the very sparse TRD regulations that have been issued that narrows exempt pre-2024 savings to being only CASH amounts, nor to only cash held in banks. Just to be clear, when it came to the pre-2024 savings issue, Carden's office advice was that the exemption would apply to TOTAL balances as of the end of 2023, regardless of whether held in cash or stocks, and including all the various types of accounts, bank, credit union, brokerage, etc. The other main area where they're at odds is on the issue of whether TRD wants expats who've remitted only tax exempt funds to file a Thai tax return. ETT says no Thai tax filing required in that situation. Carden's office says TRD has told them that expats need to file a zero sum return at least to claim exemptions allowed under any particular DTA. It's a bad and unfortunate situation overall, which I mainly put down to the TRD's thus far failure to issue clear and public written guidance about how all this is supposed to be implemented. And there's some thinking that they haven't done so thus far because there's actually no Thai law that's been enacted thus far that supports their whole new scheme changing the rules on foreign fund remittances.

If the only funds you remitted into Thailand were from U.S. Social Security, then the TRD guy giving you that information was simply WRONG. U.S. SS is absolutely EXEMPT from all Thai taxation 100% and can only be taxed by the U.S., under the terms of the US-Thai DTA. There's some debate about whether someone remitting only exempt foreign income is or isn't required to file a Thai tax return to document and claim that exemption. But there's NO debate on the fact that the Thais cannot assess any Thai taxes over U.S. SS income. One thing that I think is becoming apparent is that for all the ordinary peon TRD staff spread throughout the country, they pretty much never had to deal with or know about the details of the 60+ different DTA treaties before. Because most foreigners here were never filing or paying Thai taxes. But now with the TRD's new rules that took effect starting in 2024, suddenly there's some tens of thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands of foreigners in Thailand who potentially need to be looking at what their country's DTA says about Thai taxation, and then having to deal with those details if they decide to deal with their local TRD office. For the time being, it's a cluster-f of ignorance.

You can't rely on a general article and its wording from the Enquirer back in 2023 to accurately reflect all the details and nuances that apply when looking at what particular DTAs spell out. Thailand has some 60+ DTAs with various countries, and the specifics vary from DTA to DTA. You gotta look at them on an individual country basis. What probably is generally true, from DTA to DTA, is the general notion that if Thailand is entitled to tax some particular income that you've already been taxed for in your home country, that you're generally entitled to claim the home country tax paid as credits against whatever Thai tax a person may owe.

That, as a blanket statement, simply is not true.... Having a DTA with Thailand doesn't automatically exempt everyone from needing a TIN, filing a Thai tax return or owing Thai taxes. However, having a DTA for one's home country MAY mean that given a particular individual's types of income and amounts remitted into Thailand, that no tax filing is required and/or no taxes will be owed. But that determination is going to depend on a lot of individual factors that require delving into that person's financial details.

That's a pretty big difference between owing 14,000 THB and owing NOTHING! What are they doing, throwing a dart and seeing where it lands for any given filer??? 🙂

I didn't ask them about what had become of their prior advice on how to supposedly make US regular IRA account withdrawals not taxable in the U.S. by having the person cite Thai residency and invoke the provisions of the US-Thai DTA... I've never gone down that road personally, so I left that for another day! 🙂 The Roth account issue was a bigger concern, because I have in recent years gradually been converting modest amounts of regular IRA funds every year to tax-exempt Roths, and paying the U.S. tax on the conversions. Believing that my U.S. tax rates in the future, once I start drawing SS income, will be higher than they are now without it. But if Thailand ends up deciding that THAILAND is going to tax all future (post 2023 savings) Roth funds remittances into Thailand, and Thailand is my long-term home, I think that's going to cause me to at least adjust my current IRA-to-Roth conversion plans... FWIW, even if Thailand decided to tax Roth distributions for the future once brought into Thailand, that would only cover income first earned in 2024 and beyond, and not pre-2024 savings, which would remain exempt under TRD's prior savings policy.

Their first and primary position was that expats who are Thai tax residents who move foreign funds into Thailand should file, regardless. That's their base recommendation, and is advice they say they have confirmed with the TRD's legal staff.... But it was only later after much back and forth between myself and them, that our discussion later turned to the point that if you DON'T file, as long as the TRD never concludes you actually owed any Thai taxes, then the penalty for not filing a return that owed no taxes is very minimal. But if summoned somewhere down the road, you'd better have all your necessary documentation in order to show that your remittances were in fact non-assessable for whatever reasons, the pertinent DTA or the TRD's own policy about pre-2024 income. One of the interesting things they were very clear about, which was one of the important points I wanted to seek advice on, was whether pre-2024 savings would only be counted as CASH holdings, or also include the value of stock holdings, in other words, total account balances as of the end of 2023. And they were very clear without any waffling that any pre-2024 savings calculation would be based on TOTAL account balances, stock and cash balances inclusive.

Jim, it's just a matter of scheduling. My appointment with Carden's office happened to come first. My appointment with Expat Tax Thailand is later this week. I wanted to hear both their opinions and the basis for them, and ask about some specific details, before coming to any personal conclusions. I asked about A LOT of different related topics, one of those being TRD's stance toward Roth IRAs. Carden's office's main Thai attorney sat in on our conversation. And basically she said, they've had queries in with TRD on the subject of Roths, but haven't gotten any firm guidance back from TRD's legal staff as yet... They said they hoped for some update within perhaps a coming month. I recorded our conversation for my personal use, so I need to go back thru that later... But as best as I recall from this afternoon, when I pressed Carden's Thai tax attorney on the issue of Roths, I believe she said her current GUESS is that the TRD will end up treating Roth account remittances as TAXABLE, because they're not specifically exempted in the current U.S.-Thai DTA.

OP, so, are you saying that the ONLY funds you remitted into Thailand during 2024 were savings from pre-12/31/2023 sources? If so, those would be tax-exempt under the TRD's policy of exempting pre-2024 source income. If that's the only funds you remitted in calendar 2024, I would be surprised to hear the supervisor there telling you you needed to file a Thai tax return.... unless you had some other non-pre-2024 income remittances.

I believe it's correct that for the current 2024 tax year filing season, neither the Thai nor the English language versions of the Thai tax filing forms have any provision for reporting non-assessable foreign remittance income! One possible answer is that's they don't expect it to be reported. The other possible answer is they DO expect it to be reported, but are so slow in working thru the details of this whole new foreign remittances tax regime that they haven't updated their systems as required.

One of the other bottom lines of their advice, which I found reassuring was, if someones chooses to NOT file.... as long as when the dust settles they don't actually owe any taxes in the TRD's opinion if it ever comes to an audit or whatever... then there's no serious consequences involved. It's only if you don't file and then the TRD later concludes that you DID owe taxes and failed to report taxable remittances and failed to file the required return, that's when things could get very messy.

Thanks... Appreciate the update. Unfortunately, my wife, bless her soul, who's proficient in English and Thai, nonetheless would not be a person I'd expect to understand and correctly translate Thai Revenue Department advice about the implications of the Double Taxation Treaty between Thailand and my home country, and whether or not an actual tax filing is required to make use of its provisions....

Yep, that's part of the concern. There's obviously a financial self-interest at play here when it comes to the various expat Thai tax advisory firms. Today I was quoted 7500 THB for them to do a TIN application, and then about 15,000 THB to actually prepare and file the Thai tax return.