Transcript of the above video:

This is not a rhetorical question. I'm truly posing this question because I've talked to folks in our office, the accounting staff; I've talked to folks in other places; I've talked to an old mentor of mine who literally said nobody knows the answer to these questions. And the response is, yeah because there is no answer. There is no one-size-fits-all answer regarding tax. It is just not how it works. It's the specific facts in the underlying case that will determine things like assessability, liability, whether or not you owe anything, whether or not you need to file anything. All of that will be determined by the underlying facts in the given case.

Now that being said, a question I'm posing in this video, through their interpretive dance, these foreign interlopers that I'm calling tax stamp-pimps because that's the term from the old pre-revolutionary days in America that they used for these folks - and by the way, they are foreigners operating in complete contravention of the restricted occupations here in Thailand - they come in here and they start consulting and advising regarding Thai Tax Law, have no business doing so, completely unqualified to do so, completely illegal. I don't know why this continues to happen, but I've done another video where I pose the question, 'Why does anyone care about Tax Enforcement if Thailand clearly doesn't care about enforcing rules regarding fake Tax Advisors?" If that's who we are supposed to all be taking advice from, I don't want to operate in that system, it's illegitimate. It's nonsense. But setting that aside, again I feel like a lot of this whole tax narrative feels a lot like the nonsense we went through with COVID here where it's just a lot of "hey because we say so", and they did a lot of that in COVID. So I ask, where is the Codified Law here in Thailand that says you have to get a Tax ID under X circumstances? Where is the Codified Law that says you have to file a tax return because of X circumstances? I'm not talking about the interpretive dance and whoever says whatever, I'm talking about the Codified Law.

As I have discussed in other videos, the underlying, one of the foundational principles of the Civil Law, and as somebody comes at the law from the Common Law perspective, I do understand that I kind of come at this from an outside observer, but it's a very fundamental point to understand about the legal foundations of a Civil Law System, and that is in order to make something illegal, you have to codify it. You have to promulgate a Law. Parliament has to come out and promulgate a Law. So where is the law that explicitly states that under X circumstances, you have to get a Tax ID? Where is the law that explicitly states if you spend X amount of time, therefore now you have to file a tax return? Where is the law that says that? Again, I get it, people say, "well there was some bureaucrat from this office that said..” - I have heard things from provincial Tax Authorities that are completely at odds with things that I have heard from Bangkok Tax Authorities".

So I don't really want to hear that, "oh some guy on YouTube and therefore this is how it is!" That is not how the Law works, really, in any context it is frankly not how the law works. But coming back and focusing on the underlying point of this video is in a Civil Law System, in order to make something a legal requirement you have to promulgate a law to that effect, and where is the law that says you must file a tax return under X circumstances? Where is the law that says you must have a Tax ID under X circumstances? Again, things are subject to interpretation, but I really don't like that folks again in any context, who are going around saying under all circumstances in this context, this must happen. Minus a positive promulgated law to that effect, I have to ask where do you get the Authority for that? And I don't think it's necessarily there to make those kind of sort of broad, one-size-fits-all conclusions regarding how Tax Law applies to anyone here in the Kingdom of Thailand.