I need some help regarding adding my daughter to her mother's house registration book (tambien baan). We live in the USA and my daughter was born in America. We obtained a Thai birth certificate and Thai passport for her at the Los Angeles office.

In L.A., we were told to register her in the house book whenever we visited Thailand. We were told to bring a witness, 2 passport photos, mother's ID and passport, photocopy of daughter's birth certificate, and the house registration book. My wife called her local amphur office and was told the same info as the LA Conulate.

Today we were rejected because we only had a photocopy of the birth certificate despite the consulate and amphur instructing us to bring a photocopy (we were told original is not necessary). Additionally, my in-laws gave my daughter 50k bht to start a Thai bank account. The bank rejected my daughter's passport and said she needs to be in the house book.

All of this took place in Trang. Our pleas fell on deaf ears at both the district office and bank.

Are we getting blown off or did we get bad info 2x? Do we really have to delay this until we return in another year or two?

Sorry for the long post/rant.

It seems it is what the amohur is requiring. But you can call DOPA, the department that deals with the amphurs regarding registrations etc for advice: call-centre: 1548

Thanks for the response Mario2008!

For clarification, without calling 1548 first, is it your position that my daughter's Thai passport and photocopy birth certificate are insufficient? Or is the original birth certificate needed despite having both mother and daughter's original Thai passports.

Cheers,

M

Given the fact that she has a Thai passportt and the birth certificate info is filed in a central database that can be accessed by the amphur, I would say a copy is enough. But what matters are the official guidelines, DOPA can help you with that.

Update

Per call-centre 1548, amphurs don't have access to overseas birth certificates. As a result, the original birth certificate is needed. The passport alone doesn't nullify that requirement.

Also, having a "government official" as the only acceptable witness is false (told to us at amphur). That didn't matter anyway because our witness is.

We were also told to try a different bank. I guess Krungthai has their own set of standards.

Lesson learned: get information in writing because even representatives from the consulate and amphur give bad advice over the phone.

At least know you know.

Maybe it is possible to get a copy through the Thai Foreign Ministry, consular department, if you have time enough left in Thailand. They can be very helpful!

But a copy will probably have to come from the embassy in your home country, hence it will take time.

http://www.consular.go.th/main/

Can you not arrange for the original certified copy to be sent over by DHL or some other service?

Just I thought and it would arrive in three working days.

Regarding opening a bank account, normally a Thai citizen would open a bank account with their ID card alone but since your daughter is not yet required to have an ID card because of her age that is why they requested the Tabien Baan which would list the same ID number as her future ID card.

I very much doubt that it is a hard & fast rule not to accept a Thai passport as sufficient ID to open a savings account. So the advice to try another bank is good. In fact, I doubt that Krung Thai is any more or less lenient than the others. So a different branch or even a different person in the same branch may yield a different result.

If your family or friends have even the slightest connection to a staff member at one of the banks, I'm quite sure they would be able to solve the problem immediately.

I have found that Krung Thai is the least modern/flexible of the large Thai banks. Kaesikorn is usually very reasonable and has a good system for nofitying users about who/what is accessing their account.

By the way, you mentioned the need for a witness to register your daughter in the tabien baan. My experience was that they require TWO witnesses, each of whom would swear that they have known the person to be registered, longer than 6 months...

K F

Thanks for all of the help and ideas.

@ candyman123. We're here more for a holiday than processing paperwork. Since time is not of the essence, we'll bring the official copies next year.

@ dork. Thanks for the info, we went elsewhere where a family member works and they opened it with the passport and photocopy of the birth certificate.

@ keeniau96. K bank was much more accommodating, maybe the family member had something to do with that.

@ Khun Falang. No problems needing two witnesses this time. The only hang-up they had was indicating a witness must be a government officer. Both grandparents are retired officers and brother-in-law currently works as one. All three were present, it was like a family outing of sorts. We received an apology for getting bad info when calling the office. Regardless, LA mirrored the same bogus response. It's not funny, but the lady running the show openly talked about incompetence being the norm within many district offices as her underlings listened.

To all in my situation, again, have something in writing or the official rules in hand in a case like this. Word of mouth means nothing and it wasn't worth pulling strings to resolve this issue. We'll just put her in the house book next time we visit.

Cheers!