Transcript of the above video: 

As the title of this video suggests, we are discussing taxes and condominiums. The thing to take away from this video and to understand about this video is this is kind of one of those situations where Revenue Departments, Tax collectors, whatever you want to call them, around the world, they will always find a justification for more tax; that's just what they're good at. 

That said, I thought of making this video after reading a recent article from the Pattaya Mail, that is pattayamail.com, the article is titled: Don't panic because Thai Revenue has written to 100,000 tax residents urging registration. Quoting directly: "Director General Kulaya stated that her Department was widening the tax base and looking to increase revenue which has been negatively affected by the reduction in the number of condominium units sold over the past year. She anticipated that the main growth areas in taxation would be energy businesses, financial services and tourism. She made no specific reference to overseas income, although of course that is potentially taxable." As we have discussed in other videos, they are kind of changing the rules with regard to assessability, liability - not really the thrust of this video though. 

I like how they are blaming the lack of sales in condominiums for the need to bump up their revenue stream. Could it have anything to do with the fact that you shut down the economy for nearly three years and didn't give anybody any say in it? And now you are saying you want to come down on us like a brick bat over taxes on everything, now including condos? For those who are unaware, the vast majority of people are not going to have to deal with Condominium Tax in anything akin to property taxes that we are used to dealing with especially in the Anglo-phone or English-speaking jurisdictions, most notably and my best point of reference being the United States where we have things like mill levies and property tax. For the most part, if you are a foreign national owning a residential condo here in Thailand you're not going to deal with anything akin to property tax as we are used to it back in the United States for example. That said there are transfer taxes associated with conveyancing of condominiums from one person to the other, one entity to the other, and it may me these revenue streams that have dropped a bit that is causing concern to the Revenue Department. 

That said to blame lack of condo sales for the drop in revenue or overall economic activity that is then causing a decrease in tax collection to my mind is pretty absurd especially in light of the fact that the Government themselves shut us down economically for a matter of years. And look, at the end of the day the Government told us "oh hey deal with it, suck it up, we're all in this together!" Well we are all in this together and now it is the Government's turn to have to go through a little period of time or it's going to pinch economically because again there is air in the line, that is air in the hose if you will and until we push through what has already happened and the ramifications thereof, we are not going to get back to a sense of sort of stability in terms of tax collections. 

So my personal opinion is the worst thing that the Revenue Department can do right now is run around over-taxing, scaring away investment, scaring away tourists, scaring away people who just want to come do business here in Thailand. The better thing to do is just roll with the punches - as we all had to do for the years you made shut our businesses down - as we all had to do, it is probably just going to be one of those situations where you are just going to have to grin and bear it because it is going to take a little time for everybody to recover.