Transcript of the above video:

As the title of this video suggests, we are discussing tax again. This has been a topic of major concern here recently because there has been a recent announcement by the Revenue Department that as of January 1, 2024 it is no longer possible to mitigate Thai tax liability by timing of bringing in monies from overseas that were accrued in a different calendar year from the calendar year in which one is currently in. So what I am talking about is in the past, up to January 1, 2024 it was possible if you accrued money, earned, unearned whatever, offshore, it was possible to wait until the following calendar year to bring it into Thailand and thereby mitigate tax liability on that actual money. That is going away as of January 1, 2024. There has been a lot of discussion in a lot of our videos on that. I urge those who are watching this video if you are coming upon this for the first time, go over into the search function, just type in Tax, you will see all of the recent videos I have done talking about these changes. 

I thought of making this video after reading a recent comment on our channel. "What about the Foreign Earned Income Exclusion? How does it factor in?" With regard to what? With regard to Thai tax? Not at all. Okay let's start off first. What is the Foreign Earned Income Exclusion? For Americans who live abroad, if they earn money outside of the United States and they live abroad, they don't come back to America, basically they are not in America for 335 days out of each calendar year, if they are not in the United States, then they may be able to seek what is called The Foreign Earned Income Exclusion which allowed, there is like a COLA attached with it, I think it is 109 or probably low 100 and teens thousand dollars, where that is just excluded from tax liability because you live abroad, it's the Foreign Earned Income Exclusion. I have discussed that in and of itself in other videos on this channel. Just type in FEIE or Foreign Earned Income Exclusion in the search function in YouTube or go over to the resources section of legal.co.th, type in Foreign Earned Income, you will come up with all of that. So that is an American Tax function. The Thai Tax Authorities may or may not take that into consideration. Again, as we discussed, interpretation of Double Tax Treaties, it takes two to tango. There are two sovereigns involved and they have their own Court System so that is the place to start. One, this really hasn't been an issue up to this point. Two, I don't think so. Again depending on your circumstances if you are living in Thailand but you are earning money, that's its own analysis. Do you have a Work Permit in Thailand? Do you have a Tax ID Number? If you don't have a Work Permit, how are you earning money? That's its own thing. Then on top of that okay, you bring money in, you are trying to get sort of mitigation under the Foreign Earned Income Exclusion, well that is the US Tax Authorities that give that exclusion. That is not necessarily the Thai Tax Authorities who will be giving that. Now again, it's all going to be very circumstantially dependent and for that reason, again the word ‘exclusion’ itself would seem to denote the posture of those type of funds because they are excluded from that Tax Authority. They are saying we are not taxing it; we are excluding it from any liability in our jurisdiction. So the Double Tax Treaty is designed to mitigate against double taxation. If that is excluded by one jurisdiction, there is nothing that says the other jurisdiction, again depending on the underlying facts in the case, might be able to take jurisdiction over assessing liability on that income, again highly circumstantially dependent. 

But the thing to take away from this video is in and of itself, I don't think it is prudent to view the Foreign Earned Income Exclusion as something that is going to result in getting out of any type of tax liability which may be assessed here in the Kingdom of Thailand.