Transcript of the above video:

The question posed by this video is does having an Amity Treaty Company mean that an American does not need a Work Permit in Thailand? Yet again, I have seen this sort of meme of nonsense floating around the ether of the internet again. I have had people asking me about it. You know years back, I want to say five six years ago, this was sort of bandied about as some new and novel way around requirements here in Thailand for work authorization. The fact of the matter is No. Merely having Amity Treaty protection for a Thai Company does not exempt an American from needing a Work Permit in order to work for that company. Now a lot of people have brought up the fact that yes they liberalized the Work Permit laws sometime back allowing for, for example shareholder meetings or Director Meetings especially where the Director does not live and work in Thailand, they are basically like it is an international or regional sort of outfit; this person just basically flies in once a year to attend a given meeting and possibly sign some documentation, go through some formalities, yes the Thai Government went ahead and liberalized the law in such a way that those kind of folks could come in and not need to worry necessarily about Work Permit and Work Authorization in order to undertake that. A lot of people took that and ran with it to say ‘oh this exempts us from everything having to do with the Company’. It doesn't. I have seen this multiple times where people have tried to do this on their own and they have ended up in varying degrees of a bad situation to the point of one person who ended up almost deported as a result of it because they thought quite honestly in that situation I think they were thinking they were a lot smarter than they were and kind of being a little bit arrogant about it and lo and behold they didn't know what they were talking about at the end of the day. 

Long story short, notwithstanding the fact that yes US-Thai Treaty of Amity through its national treatment provisions, allows Americans to own their companies outright in Thailand notwithstanding the provisions of the Foreign Business Act. That said, this has nothing to do with individual work authorization. Work authorization is conferred by your visa and your Work Permit. It has nothing to do with the company per se except insofar as the company may be acting as the sponsor and that may be where you are working. That said, just because you have an Amity Treaty Company, does not mean you do not need a Work Permit here in the Kingdom of Thailand.