Transcript of the above video: 

Recently I got a comment that was a question on Foundations in Thailand; I don't talk about Foundations very often. For those who are unaware, we are talking about nonprofits, charitable organizations; you could maybe call them NGOs although I would not say the way the Thais set up foundations is really an apples-to-apples comparison to what you would call an NGO in the West. That said, I'll quote from the comment: "You mentioned before that your firm assists in establishing a foundation for charity purposes. Can you do a video on that or is it too short of a topic?" Well fair enough. I know I have done some long videos lately, but frankly there is a lot going on here. It has public policy implications, legal implications, so I have been doing videos on it. 

But long story short, one of the reasons I don't do a lot of videos or talk much about Foundations is years back - this is something I remember in my first years here in Thailand - is I would get all these emails from people, "I want to set up a Foundation", because nobody ever wants to pay tax. Nobody ever wants to come over here and pay into Thailand; they just want a bunch of benefits out of Thailand, and in my mind, the Foundation was often like the first go to kind of “scammy” type work around for people that just didn't want to pay anything in but wanted to have something that they could do here to maintain Work Permits and Visas and basically have a good old time basically. And also, I think they were trying to create sort of a black hole if you will as a tax dodge that they could basically move money into a Foundation, call it a "donation", and then nobody could touch it, and they could "administer" their donated funds and things. Yeah, I get it. There was a time that that worked in other jurisdictions. Thailand had never worked for those purposes. 

It's also worth pointing out, especially when we went into COVID and came out of COVID, there have been huge crackdowns on so-called Volunteer Visas and many of them were associated with Foundations. Many of those Foundations were sketchy and, in my opinion, set up for reasons completely antithetical to the reasons for a Foundation to begin with. That said, to get a Foundation you have to register with the Ministry of Interior; it has to be shown to have a “public benefit”; there are minimal capital requirements. Basically there is a discretionary adjudication as to whether or not a Foundation is warranted. I believe you have to have a minimum of three directors, you have to have registered office space. There are minimum formalities, but long story short, it really comes down to whether or not it is a genuine charitable endeavour. 

Now there are genuine charitable endeavours and there are people that do engage in volunteer activities here in Thailand in a genuine way. But the fact of the matter is, there also many folks that try to come over here over the years and set these things up is basically a dodge or a workaround so that they could have all these benefits without really having to pay much into Thailand. 

As a practical matter, I view foundations as much of a red herring. I don't think that for foreigners they are particularly useful. If anything, I think they could get foreigners into trouble especially in the aftermath of the Volunteer Visa crackdowns, I think they could get foreigners into more trouble than provide benefit.