How To Show Income For Marriage O, Without Tax Documents?

[Krub]

I spoke to several visa agents in Pattaya at the weekend concerning the application of a Marriage visa. For between 24,500 & 40,000 baht they will guarantee you a visa with no supporting documentation other than passports/id cards/marriage certificates & a few photos of you with your spouse. They do not require evidence of income, evidence of income tax paid or vast amounts of monies in banks. I can only assume from this that they have a 'friend' in the govt. who can 'fix' things. This is Thailand.

Not recommended

[geoffphuket]

I spoke to several visa agents in Pattaya at the weekend concerning the application of a Marriage visa. For between 24,500 & 40,000 baht they will guarantee you a visa with no supporting documentation other than passports/id cards/marriage certificates & a few photos of you with your spouse. They do not require evidence of income, evidence of income tax paid or vast amounts of monies in banks. I can only assume from this that they have a 'friend' in the govt. who can 'fix' things. This is Thailand.

More likely a home made rubber stamp

[FatBoyEric]

I spoke to several visa agents in Pattaya at the weekend concerning the application of a Marriage visa. For between 24,500 & 40,000 baht they will guarantee you a visa with no supporting documentation other than passports/id cards/marriage certificates & a few photos of you with your spouse. They do not require evidence of income, evidence of income tax paid or vast amounts of monies in banks. I can only assume from this that they have a 'friend' in the govt. who can 'fix' things. This is Thailand.

More likely a home made rubber stamp

One of the agents showed me two bank account books in foreigners names, he claimed that he'd just deposited 800,000 of his own money in each one to help get retirement visas. Another one showed me photocopies of several passports containing visas that had just been obtained. One was a category 6 non-imm 0 type, What is a category 6?

[PomBenKunNZ]

Hi,

I've been searching for hours and this is the closest active thread to my situation.

I spent a pretty frustrating day in Laem Ngop today. I am in Thailand with wife my Thai wife (met and married in NZ 5 years ago) and son on a 3 month single entry non-immigrant O visa. It's up at the end of the week. Yep, I shouldn't have got onto this much earlier.

I work as an employee for a NZ company that I partially own via the Internet. I pay taxes as a normally salaried employee in NZ and made sure that I was granted NZ tax residency status in NZ before I moved to Thailand. I support my wife who looks after our son in true 1950's style. My wife's schoolmate works at Laem Ngop immigration and gave us a list of documentation to bring which we did. Unfortunately we half jumped the queue as a result but got stuck discussing the details of the thing halfway through someone else's interview while my son climbed all around me as we stood in a hallway with everyone staring at us. With my wife talking in Thai with her friend and the officer I was soon behind the 8 ball.

Problem is that our officer said that I needed to pay tax on my income in Thailand. I had provided Thai banks statements showing more than 40,000 baht going into our joint account each month since we got here and a letter from the bank with our current (pay day is tomorrow) 10,000 baht balance. I also provided my last year's NZ tax summary (original uncertified) showing a lot more than 40,000 baht earnt per month in the last tax year. I tried to explain through my wife's translation that NZ has a tax treaty with Thailand and that the tax was already paid etc, but he said that it didn't matter what we said that what we needed was Thai tax receipts and so go off to inland revenue (or whatever it's called here) and come back with a tax receipt. He suggested it wouldn't be much anyway. So off we went.

Very helpful tax staff. Rang their boss. He agreed that we owed no tax, and while generally he liked to collect money he had no means to take it from us and issue said receipt. Eventually they offered to let me declare my money transfers as income on a pink form, and they would charge just 0.5% tax, or 1,200 baht per 6 months. Sounds great. But, my questions and concerns are:

1) If I fill in that form with my NZ company details and earnings expressed as my Thai currency transfers will there be a problem down the track with someone saying I should have a Thai work visa if I have Thai taxable income?

2) 0.5% seems crazy low. When I file a blue form or something else in Jan(?) or sometime else down the track will there be a tax bill of 10s of thousands of baht for some aspect of tax owing that someone hasn't told me about?

3) Is there some other immigration office that accepts the concept of working overseas while living here, as sunbelt seem to:

http://www.sunbeltlegaladvisors.com/Thailand-Marriage-Visa.php

"

Option 2.

Working outside Thailand: You must provide a certified income statement from your embassy. You may also be asked to provide a letter from your employer, or other documents to support the proof of income. (ie. bank statements)."

I.e. is it worth trying Pattaya with my exisitng documentation? I don't have current NZ bank statements unless they accept web-based PDFs or printouts, which is how I get them.

4) The NZ embassy tells me:

"

The New Zealand government does not write letters to confirm the income of private citizens, even when presented with evidence of earnings such as bank statements, dividend certificates, accountants letters, etc. However, we are able to make Certified True Copies of these documents if they are of New Zealand origin. The fee for this service is 500 THB.

Please note that we expect any letters to be on an appropriate and recognisable letter head - we have been presented with 'accountants letters' written with regular Microsoft word. We do not accept these.

Alternatively, you could make a Statutory Declaration of your income. The fee for this service is 850 THB."

Will the Statutory Declaration cut the mustard? Is it what Sunbelt are referring to? Should I go this route in Bangkok?

5) If all else fails, which nearby country/city should I fly to to get a new 90 Non-Im-O-Family visa? Do I need to take my son or can you still get a 3 year old on Dad's passport, even though he has his own?

I am running very low on time so I have to choose one office and one strategy soon considering it takes me 6 hours to get to Bangkok and the NZ embassy.

Thanks much for any help or at least commiseration. Feel free to have a crack at just one of my questions if you've got something. I think that people working on Net while here is getting increasingly common, but I have yet to see the definitive thread.

Thanks very much, go All Blacks World Cup '07!