Dogmatix

A 5% tax rate on gifts to spouses or ascendant or descendant next of kin is applied, only if the gifting exceeds 20 million in a tax year. What makes you think a spouse cannot use a gift to buy property? And what do you think are the criteria the RD uses to determine hat a spousal gift is a true gift or otherwise, particularly given that all assets acquired by either spouse after marriage are immediately deemed common conjugal property under the Civil & Commercial Code. The law has been on the books for 9 years now. So you should be able to find ample evidence to support your interpretations.

It is 20 million baht a year, not 1 million. The gift tax law was introduced in 2015 in tandem with the revived inheritance tax. The law appears very broad and doesn't place any particular restrictions on gifts to spouses or what they may do with them. There is only one known case where the RD has challenged gifts remitted from overseas and that was on the basis that the couple were not officially married. So the gifts were deemed not to qualify as exempt gifts on that basis. I attach the law and the case. In lieu of more detailed information or regulations on this from the RD, you need to use your own imagination to interpret this regulation, as many posters have already done copiously here. Gift Tax 2015 EN.docx Gift Tax Case RD KK0702-530 11 Feb 2023.docx

If you have earned interest overseas on the crypto that you transferred overseas and then remit that interest back to Thailand, the RD will consider it assessable income. Capital gains on the crypto would also be taxable, if they arise in Thailand, or if they arise overseas and are remitted to Thailand. Whether you have to pay Thai tax on this assessable income depends on whether you are Thai tax resident and have overall assessable income in excess of the threshold and personal deductions. How the RD will track this sort of income is another matter. They say they are using AI to detect tax avoidance but so far this seems directed at the vast number of Thais who doing personal business online and offline without filing tax returns. They are analysing bank account data and sifting through Facebook accounts that Thais use to sell stuff online. Bitkub states on its website that the RD has so far not requested account data, nor has it come up with a means of implementing the 15% withholding tax on crypto capital gains that is already on the books but not yet enforced. Most likely in the fullness of time, the RD will come up with ways of tracking crypto income. .

I see some posters allude to the UK's regulations for remittance based taxation of non-doms who are wealthy foreigners living in the UK and taking advantage of the dregs of the UK's long standing, controversial scheme to attract them to take up residence in the UK and feel that the RD might draw some inspiration from the copious HMRC regulations relating to taxation of foreign source remittances for non-doms. Originally the scheme allowed foreigners to take up residence in the UK and avoid paying tax on global income and gains like common or garden UK tax residents and pay tax only UK source income and remitted foreign source income indefinitely. Now non-dom status has to be purchased by paying a standing tax charge on foreign source income which makes it only worthwhile to those would otherwise pay more than the standing charge and the status is no longer indefinite. The government has always claimed it attracted a lot of rich foreigners to come and spend oodles of cash and invest in the UK but it has always been wildly unpopular with Brits who have to pay their taxes on global income and gains in full whether remitted or not. Rishi Sunak's wealthy Indian wife, who has a vast private income from dividends in India, took advantage of the scheme and was effectively a poster girl for those who wish to abolish the scheme. In the latest budget the Conservative government announced further restrictions to the non-dom scheme which was already on its last legs. Since the new regulations will apply in April 2025 and the Conservative government will almost certainly have been ousted by Labour in an election before then, it is unlikely that these new restrictions will ever be applied. Instead, it is more likely that a Labour government will announce the complete abolition of the non-dom privileged system of taxation and all UK tax residents will have to pay tax on their global income and gains, regardless or whether remitted to the UK or not. Whether or not the RD will seek inspiration from the non-dom scheme, once it has been abolished remains to be seen. Anyway, it is certainly highly unlikely that Thailand would ever adopt a non-dom scheme, other than the tax privilege for LTR visa holders which probably would never have seen the light of day post P. 161/2566, and may eventually be scrapped, if there is a proper reform to the tax of foreign source income via an act of parliament. If they study the history of the UK's non-dom system, the RD will understand that it has been deeply unpopular with locals and would certainly cause a backlash from Thais investing overseas. The RD claimed (somewhat disingenuously) that the purpose of P. 161/2566 was to promote fairness and ensure that all Thai tax residents would be treated fairly.

His wife is Thai and probably a lot of the assets are in her name already.

There is a 15% withholding tax on crypto capital gains but it is not applied because it is impractical to make crypto exchanges deduct withholding tax on gains which they cannot automatically compute. According to the amendment the taxpayer should use the 15% withheld as a tax credit and pay the difference or get a refund, if their tax rate is more or less than 15%. It is not clear when or if the withholding tax will be implemented.

You could say that Mr Fehr deserves it but the personal interference in his case by the xenophobe interior minister and lack of due process are shocking. One can't help feeling that, if it had been a rich Thai Chinese who had kicked the lady doctor, the case wouldn't even have hit the news because she would have been successfully threatened and intimidated.

Cannabis needs an import license and presumably an export license but it sounds like they might just go with fining and deportations for overstaying and let the Filipino justice system deal with them which is by no means certain. A friend who was managing ships with Filipino crews sent home a ship’s cook who had murdered the Filipino first officer with a kitchen knife for complaining his pans were not clean enough. The murder happened in international waters off Curaçao where the Dutch authorities declined to arrest him. So my friend sent him back to the Philippines, giving the Filipino FBI details of the case and the cook’s flight details. The FBI claimed jurisdiction and said they would arrest him at the airport but went to meet the wrong flight Then they lost interest and the cook got a job with another Manila based ship management company.

One of the reports said just one neighbour heard the screams. She was said to have lived there for 50 years, so must be fairly elderly. She reportedly said she heard two screams and would have poked her head out the window, if she had heard a third. But presumably she left it at that when there were no more screams. It seems the scream count was well short of her criterion for calling the unresponsive plod. After poking her head out the window, she might have needed to see a body fall from an upstairs window before making the call.

So far only one photo of her which looks very posed with her holding a probably fake antiquarian book as a prop. She was young and appeared pretty in the photo but didn’t look overtly like a bar girl or hooker. It’s a rather romantic type shot. The plod have been slow off the mark but lots of material for them to investigate. Friends who reported her unresponsive need will provide details of her life in London. There is CCTV, her visa status in UK - if she really had a HK passport, she could travel on that to the UK without visa. Who rented the very expensive 5 bedroom house in prime London area. Was she staying there alone? Are the reports about a British husband true?

Not a lot of information on this case or the unfortunate victim. Thai language reports are translations of what was in the British press. She was said to have a Hong Kong passport as well as a Thai one and went to the UK in September to join a British husband who is not named in any of the reports and no mention of them living together. Since she had a HK passport and there is nothing so far about her life or family in Thai media, it is possible she wasn’t brought up in Thailand and has no close family here, although more may emerge in Thai language media later. The place she was murdered was a 5 bedroom terrace house in Marble Arch 200 yards from Hyde Park that served as the Ethiopian embassy until 4 years ago. Now thought to be an AirBNB. She can’t have been there more than a few days, as neighbours said a Swedish family was renting over Easter. In that area there are AirBNB 2 bed flats offered at 400 pounds plus a night and a 6 bed house at 1,840 a night. So the house in Stanhope Place must have been renting at north of 1,000 pounds a night. Not your average young Thai lady joining a British hubby in the UK and no suggestion she is from an ultra wealthy Thai or HK family.

used to need someone to vouch your photo was a true likeness at the embassy and consular staff were willing to do that. Since the embassy stopped issuing passports this requirement is only for first time adult passports, as far as I am aware.

I think it will be a problem for guys who get their state pensions remitted direct to Thailand monthly or quarterly. If you get it paid to a UK bank account and remit once a year or so, you can argue it was the pension amount reflected in your P60 for the previous tax year. That is assuming they accept an uncertified P60 of course. I think that having private pensions remitted direct to Thailand will also be problematic. It would be better not to have any regular income remitted direct but I know that some people have had their UK bank accounts closed down, eg Barclays, which leaves them little flexibility to time remittances. Pensions from UK government jobs are of course exempt from Thai tax under the DTA. The British government didn't bother to make state pensions exempt like the US did. The exemption was probably to be had for the asking at the time but no one asked.

It is very clear from the RD's Q&A (Q9 attached) that income remitted while not yet tax resident doesn't retroactively become taxable when the remitter becomes tax resident. They give an example of a Thai person living in Taiwan and planning to remit money saved in China and return home. They say clearly that they remit the money before coming tax resident again, it is not taxable and they don't say that it becomes taxable retroactively after the person moves back. It would be rather impracticable to try to tax it retroactively anyway without any regulations to specify how far back they could go. If you remitted money to Thailand 20 years ago and then became tax resident, would that be taxable? Obviously not. So why would it taxable, if remitted the year before you become tax resident? I was expecting an outcry from resort condo developers and some sort of exemptions to be made for purchase of property but we are now well into the tax year and there has been no outcry from developers and nothing has happened. It would make sense to give an exemption on income remitted to buy a condo, as long as it was owned for about 5 years, but it doesn't look like this is going to happen. Apart from the fact no one has publicly asked for this, I would see some difficulties from the RD's perspective. Tax in Thailand is nationality neutral. I can think of no part of the Revenue Code that taxes Thais and foreigners differently and promotion of tourism is not the RD's job. Any exemption would have to be applied equally to Thais and foreigners and and the RD would view allowing people exemption on income remitted to buy land and other property as an undesirable loophole. Many Thais would rather buy a piece of land with their investment profits and hold it for 5 years than pay 35% tax on it. They will most likely get another round of profit from the land. Another issue is that an exemption would require an amendment to the Revenue Code. The government would probably just say they have already amended the Revenue Code with the Royal Decree to give complete exemption on remittances to LTR visa holders and these are the only foreigners they want to attract to stay long term. If the others don't buy condos or leave, they don't care because they believe there are plenty more rich foreigners queuing for LTRs and this will be consistent with their long term stay policy of rich guys in, poor guys out. RD Order 161 2566 Q&A TH.pdf

I think members should be allowed to choose their own level of discourse without requiring them to dumb down discussions to only address the lowest common denominator. If that is the case, it is hardly likely that any gold nuggets of information will ever be found in any of the threads. As for whether RD policy makers look at gold standards from other jurisdictions as best practice they should emulate, we can only speculate on that. Probably some do and others never even look at what happens outside the four walls of their own room.

It's all a matter of opinion but I personally have more confidence in my understanding of gift tax because it is set out in black and white in the Revenue Code and there has not any controversy over the RD's application of the gift tax exemption or any cases that suggest that since it was introduced in 2016. Where I have really low confidence is in the application of the RD of DTAs which are not even mentioned in the Revenue Code as being applicable to PIT. That is odd as Thai statutory law would normally be amended to reflect the existence of international treaties and specify how they should be applied, as you can see in the Land Code. The RD has had decades to amend the Revenue Code in this way but has failed to do so. There is a ruling from a few decades ago on one case that said tax credits were applicable to salary tax withheld in the Philippines under the DTA but there are few details in that ruling to say how tax credits should be applied and nothing whatsoever vis a vis investment income which we are told is the RD's main target. That means there is no statutory low, ministerial regulations or Revenue Department regulations on how DTAs should be applied. That leaves room for a great deal of inconsistent discretion by individual RD officers and the possibility that many applications for tax credits will be rejected due to lack of acceptable documentation or due to out of synch tax years, leaving tax payers to pay the total Thai tax due and try to get a refund of the total tax paid overseas on foreign source income.

I have never heard of Dezan, Shira & Associates but it doesn't matter much what their reputation is or what resources they have in Asia because because 2 out of 7 points are nonsense: a) Thai citizens; b) A Thai resident who filed taxes in the previous tax year; And the connecting phrase is misleading because it fails to draw a distinction between income received from outside Thailand that is remitted to Thailand and that which is not. And who receive income from inside or outside Thailand via: I don't know you would want to draw stuff from other peoples' unverified ebsites which are probably plagiarised from somewhere else, in the trust that they have read the Revenue Code in detail and thoroughly understand it, rather than based on direct reading of the Revenue Code yourself. Anyway, if you want to put that in the tax guide, I don't care because I have no interest in the guide. I also think it would be better to keep this thread for discussion of the tax change at hand and not to clutter this thread with discussion of the phraseology of the tax guide, as I am sure many others are not interested in discussing the guide That should be done in the tax guide thread itself, or if you don't want any discussion in that for some reason, open a dedicated thread for comments on the tax guide.

I don't know whose website this is from but it is pretty hopeless. Thai citizens are not liable to pay tax unless they are tax residents or have Thai source income. It makes no difference whether you filed taxes the previous year or not. If you stop having assessable income, no need to keep on filing PND90/91s. The second part creates confusion about assessability of offshore income. The actual situation is that income paid offshore but arising from Thailand is taxable regardless of whether the recipient is tax resident in Thailand because it is Thai source income. Foreign source income is only taxable on remittance to Thailand.

Indeed the Civil & Commercial Code definition of a gift contradicts itself. In the first part it says that a gift is irrevocable. In the second part it outlines conditions for a gift to be revoked. Furthermore the CC&C definition of common conjugal property means that spousal gifts immediately become common conjugal property. I don't think we can get much help from unattributed views in expat blogs and the RD probably doesn't pay much attention to taxability of gifts in other countries. The Revenue Code is very open in exempting gifts up to 20 mil between married couples. It doesn't define gifts or make any limitations. It doesn't even say that a spouse, who has received a gift may never make a gift back their spouse. If there are other cash flows into the receiving spouse's bank account, the RD is not in a position to argue that the re-gifted amount came from the initial gift or other funds. Plus the fact that all funds received after marriage are conjugal property anyway. The only way to get greater clarity is to find individual cases of gifts. I found one and posted it. Then there is the case of a Potjaman's gift to her brother-in-law that was initially ruled taxable on the grounds that there was insufficient evidence that this was a gift made on a special occasion because it occurred 2 years after his marriage. Then the appeal court ruled it was in fact a wedding gift. The fact that there may not be any others since the gift tax amendment may suggest it is not a controversial subject for the RD. Both of these cases relied solely on what was in the statutory law and didn't bring in any other regulations or reinterpretations of the law.

They might but in that case would they worry, if the giftor claimed a 60k spouse allowance or a refund of 3k in withholding tax? In the only case study we have so far the only things that the RD investigated was that the gift was not over 20 mil and that the couple was lawfully married. Of course more cases may follow but anything more to do with irrecoverability and separation of assets is going to hard for them to argue, given that the CC&C makes impossible to keep ownership of conjugal assets separate. More likely they would push the finance ministry for a Royal Decree to reduce the exempt amount which is on the cards anyway along with a reduction in the 100 mil exemption on IHT. I believe gift tax will continue to be looked in tandem with the IHT, rather than in tandem with this remittance reinterpretation.

I think it would be hard for the RD to argue in the Tax Court that a spousal gift could not be used to buy property or a car or something that the giftor might get some benefit from, when the gift already became common conjugal property the moment it arrived in the receiving spouse's bank account. So I somehow doubt the RD would want to dig into this sort of thing and risk lengthy court cases they might lose, given the lack of law and regulations to support their view. Bear in mind that this is not going to be just an expat thing. Wealthy Thais who have made millions from investing overseas in stocks on the NASDAQ etc are also going to be gifting untaxed capital gains back to their spouses.

Thai RD bureaucrats don't make these type of judgments. If the Revenue Code allows you to claim a 60k allowance for having a spouse, they will let you claim it without question. Unless they investigate your wife's remittances, they won't know, she has received a tax exempt gift from you anyway because the tax return form only requires declaration of gifts in excess of 20 mil from a spouse. You don't have to declare a gift under 20 mil and then claim exemption. They will also not care whether you claim a refund of withholding tax which is likely to be fairly miniscule, since the maximum tax free interest is 20k which at 15% withholding tax and 0.5% interest on savings accounts gives a maximum refund of 3,000. The kind things they might look at would be someone with huge interest income reported by Thai banks but very little income declared on tax returns to explain where the savings came from.

Agreed. Opinions and assumptions can be useful but should be clearly identified as such, if not supported by any evidence.

You are welcome. For your interest I have attach the RD case study which is quite recent from Feb 2023. At the beginning is a google translation but the original is at the bottom. A further complication in considering gifts to spouses is the provision in the Civil and Commercial Code that any income or assets acquired after marriage become part of the the common conjugal assets means that the gift to your spouse immediately becomes your joint property, not her sole property. I think that will make it very difficult for the RD to pursue spousal gifts to try to argue they were not irrecoverable gifts, as also defined in the CC&C. It would also be a nightmare to try to establish that, for example, you got benefit from a house or a car she bought with the gift because you used it. If she used it for household expenses, as the person in the house study claimed, you would obviously get some benefit too. Your point about filing separate tax returns is an interesting one. I hadn't thought of that, although I just filed a separate tax return for the missus for the first time because she started to get some income that would have been taxed in a higher tax bracket, if I had continued to file jointly. I am not sure though it would make any difference. Filing a joint tax return doesn't imply that you have pooled your assets, which are legally pooled under the CC&C anyway. It only implies that your spouse has not much assessable income, so that you can take advantage of her allowances without being affected by her income. Anyway the clause in the RD about spousal gift exemption is very broad: 42 (27) Income derived from maintenance and support or gifts from ascendants, descendants or spouse, but only for the portion not exceeding twenty million Baht throughout the tax year. The clause does mention maintenance or support but adds "or gift" which presumably means that exempted gifts to spouses are not restricted to sums needed for household subsistence but that any gifts under 20 million. whatever the purpose, are exempted. At any rate there are very few households that need 20 million in after tax income to run smoothly, which if restricted to half the maintenance costs would limit it even further to 40 million households. Looking at the history of gift tax, it was introduced in 2016 on the same day as the revival of inheritance tax and was intended to be used in tandem. The gift exemptions were intended as sweeteners to get IHT through the coup legislature and Council of State and avoid a backlash. Inheritances to spouses are tax exempt but the 20 million exemption allows billionaires to pass on their estates to children tax free while they are still alive. That can be the only reason for a 20 million cap and it is unlikely that the RD has been audition offspring from ultra wealthy families to check that their living expenses are 20 million a year. Will the RD take an different approach when the gift exemption emerges as a loophole in its new remittance tax. Who knows? They might wish to but also might not find much support in existing laws and regulations which are bare bones. The big problem for he RD is that they are imposing this remittance tax by themselves with no supporting legislation or ministerial regulations and there is a limit to their powers to change laws. Gift Tax Case RD KK0702-530 11 Feb 2023.docx

There is no evidence for the view that gifts are only exempt, if they are made from income on which Thai tax has already been paid. The provision on gifts in the Revenue Code makes no mention of this and there are no ministerial or RD regulations to this effect. The only case study on the RD's website about gifts is an example about a foreigner who sent remittances from abroad at irregular intervals to his Thai girlfriend. Some of the remittances were of a size that could have been regarded as maintenance and others which significantly larger than this. The RD didn't question that the remittances were from abroad and therefore obviously not out of income taxed in Thailand or that some were too much for regular maintenance. The only point at issue for the RD was that the couple wasn't legally married and therefore the gifts were assessable for the woman's PIT. I seem to recall they said in the commentary that the gifts would all have been exempted, if they had been legally married. As you say, a gift from overseas is unlikely to have been taxed in Thailand, unless you earned the money in Thailand and remitted it overseas before gifting it back to Thailand and the RD official talking at the Swiss Embassy would probably have mentioned that gifts from overseas were effectively not exempted, if this were the case.