Transcript of the above video: 

As the title of this video suggests, we are posing the question "Can those who operate an Amity Treaty Company here in Thailand work without a permit?"

I got a question from somebody in an email that referenced this nonsense from years ago. It's like 10 years old, this specious, spurious analysis, it is pretty old now on a change to the regulations pertaining to work authorization in Thailand. What was the change? The change was that they relaxed certain rules to allow folks, especially folks from abroad, to travel into Thailand, temporarily engage in a meeting, attend a meeting for a company for example the Board of Directors or a Shareholder Meeting - either one of those. It used to be you had to have a Work Permit even to do that, to do that rather minor task, just attend a Shareholder Meeting or a Director Meeting. In a, I believe it was the Emergency Decree on foreign labour in March of 2018 if I recall correctly, this was even more codified than it even was prior to that where they said "yeah we're not going to require Work Permits for that per se." Many people then ran out and said "well that means I don't need to Work Permit at all to operate my company." No that's not what it means. It means you don't necessarily need work authorization to attend a Shareholder Meeting or a Director Meeting which I don't know that most folks would consider that day-to-day work in the traditional sense. 

That said, if you want to work in Thailand and if you are really working in Thailand you still need a Work Permit. I actually saw people get arrested who relied on that advice some years ago and they said "well I am just here attending meetings and things." The Thais said, "you have been here six months. What are you talking about? Has it been an ongoing shareholder meeting for six months? No, that's ridiculous." And the people that came up with that logic unfortunately, a lot of people who detrimentally relied on it, got into a lot of problems. I don't want to see that happen again. So when I see a question like that pop up, I like to make a video to sort of dispel the nonsense so that folks don't get into a problem that they can't deal with here in the Kingdom of Thailand.