Yumthai

From BP: "There were 11.9 million personal income tax forms filed for the income year 2023, submitted between Jan 1 and April 29, 2024, an increase of 3.34% from the same period last year." Increased filing is certainly subsequent of fall 2023 announcements. The article is misleading as it's mixing corporate and personal income tax information. PIT is calculated with data collected during the full calendar year. There is no way to extract a specific period from individual tax returns. Applying a 9/12 coefficient to get a Fiscal Year approximate amount would be imo absurd. Whatever. Tax has increased. Fine. You assume that it could be because of the concrete actions (audits, penalties, ...) taken by TRD during 2023, that you can't factually back up. I assume it's not. I think it's because of the increase of filings (fact) and possibly that people who filed made more money (my guess).

"In Thailand, the government's fiscal year (FY) is 1 October to 30 September of the following year.[63] For individual taxpayers it is the calendar year, 1 January to 31 December." We're discussing tax on individuals. Sept. 2023 and further announcements had impact on worried individuals feeling the urgent need to start declaring or declare more early 2024 (their 2023 income).

I've never said TRD is doing nothing, they are apparently very good in Marketing as their communication - only - is being fruitful.

Some sheep obey because the shepherd just says beware of the wolf, although there is no wolf. The change in regulation that is the purpose of this thread!

The fact that the tax revenue has substantially increased only proves that more people voluntarily declare and thus pay more tax, partly because of alarming (for some) TRD announcements. We have no clue if these announcements where followed by concrete, systemic and successful in-field actions being taken nationwide to audit and collect tax money from residents.

In my view the bigger Thai residents crowd paying on average little tax would, if efficiently collected, generate more tax in total than the smaller foreign residents crowd paying on average a higher amount of tax. It would be indeed easier to enforce tax on foreigners via immigration but it will be highly discriminatory.

In the same way, you're guess-working on effective future tax enforcement. A very small % of Thai residents pays tax, that's factual, and it's certainly a consequence of the lack of TRD enforcement don't you think?

I hope you're being sarcastic, sometimes I'm wondering.

Bob will learn that nothing will happen bc this is Thailand.

Any decision that one has to make in life is a negotiation between one's possible outcomes assessment of a situation. Granted that risk-aversion varies.

The point is not Thailand collecting and holding comprehensive data on their residents. It's indeed technically not too complicated to merge and query all databases at their disposal in order to, for instance, list per calendar year all residents (Thai and foreigners) who are tax residents along with their aggregated Thai bank balances and where foreign inward transfers total amount exceed a certain threshold. They could have this kind of information since many years via a simple mouse click. Depending on that threshold this could be a very long list. The point is they were and are doing nothing with all this available information. Why would they tomorrow? Do they have the capacity to yearly audit several 10K, 100K or perhaps millions of tax residents? Do they really have the political will to strictly enforce tax possibly facing unwanted large consequences on the economy? I don't think so.

I've been here for about the same, it seems then we live in two parallel universes.

Sure... but he should also digest the full spectrum of the real situation here, i.e. corruption everywhere, inconsistent unfair and vastly unenforced rules barely followed with reason by the huge majority of the population, before making blind moves. And maybe, just maybe he'll become Smart Sean.

Honest Harry will really have a hard time in Thailand.

Good point here.

Shall we take the literal definition of "bringing something"... and then exclude all payments and gifts? There are way more interpretations of "bring" than you can think of.

Contractors and business owners will not be considered tax residents if they remain less than 180 days/year in Thailand, however their business activity while in Thailand could be considered as local work therefore any proceeds from their work wherever it is paid could be local income and taxable as such.

The English (or any other language) transcription of the Thai Law is irrelevant and could have been translated to the closest meaning without being able to transcript exactly Thai language wording and sense. Thai language has no straight meaning and is way of interpretation, and that is largely used in one way or another by authorities and lawyers. That's part of the Thai culture as well as compromise and needs to be understood by anyone living in Thailand. There is no consistency, no certainty but at the end of the day the sky is not falling.

Individual audits should happen but anecdotal compare to the number of tax residents, surely triggered by denunciation of suspicious and significant amounts of money movements. I've personally never heard about Thai or foreign resident being individually tax audited.

Would be interesting to know how much of the 25% only filed to get a tax refund.

Transfer of ownership could be as simple, and perfectly legal, as a piece of paper stating Mr Smith gives ownership of 10K USD to Mrs Nong. The 10K USD is located at address A in country C. I don't see why it must be in a bank account at Mrs Nong name or transferred later on only from Mrs Nong bank account. Anyway, if it happens to be the case then the tax loophole is definitely not closed as a Thai resident can just hold a bank account offshore (very easy to open a non-CRS USD account in Cambodia) to receive all gifts and remit it tax-free in Thailand at any time.

My view: You gift a Thai resident a house, car, watch, diamond, gold bar,... or 10K USD in country X offshore. The Thai resident is now the owner of the house, car, watch, diamond, gold bar, 10K USD in country X offshore. The gift (or gift sale proceed) remittance in Thailand that may or may not happen further in time is a tax-exempted remittance of the giftee property. I didn't read any gift tax treatment differences between tangible and intangible assets regarding gifting offshore and remittance. Again, there is no clarity about Gift rules and way of interpretation as usual with Thai Law.

The point is gifting abroad where there is no clarity from TRD. I believe the remittance event occurs after the gift act so the remittance happens for the giftee not the gifter, whatever the way the gift is transferred in Thailand.

Yes the gift is valid when received. When the gifter sends a gift to the giftee, this is not a remittance event for the gifter. This is my opinion.

That's your opinion. The only way to have clarity is to wait a case report, if that ever happens, where a gifter tax resident is penalized to have gifted from offshore a Thai resident and not declaring it.