Transcript of the above video:

In many ways and I have said this for years, I am actually a member of the Tax Court. I am an American Attorney obviously as I have stated in many of my introductions; I am a member of the Tax Court in the United States; I do from time to time advise folks on Tax Matters, primarily pertaining to entities here in Thailand, taxation in an international context. The reason for this video, it is going a little deeper, it is going into sort of my opinion and where I think sort of things are heading, if that makes any sense. 

I think we are heading to a place where Tax Status and Immigration Status are probably going to be more intertwined as time goes on. I want to be very clear. If I am not clear from some of my other opinion videos especially on things like Central Bank Digital Currencies; I am not overly in favour of this. I very much enjoy and believe that the separation of jurisdictions, the sort of arm's length of national jurisdictions especially, is a good thing in many ways; I believe international travel and the right, the Human Right as well as the US Constitutional Right but the human right generally as noted by the UN themselves, to travel are very fundamental rights to humanity, period. Now they sort of say "right to travel" but we never said you had the right to travel without being taxed or something along those lines. We said you had the right to travel but not the right to travel without a passport, you got to go through XYZ steps to get to that. I am not going to go into a full-blown analysis of like the passport issue. We have all kind of come to, a hundred years ago they didn't use passports. If you watch a movie called "Tea with Mussolini" it is a pretty good example of one where up to that point, British especially British Debutants would go on their Grand Tour through Italy for example. People didn't have passports back then; they just went to that country and they usually used what were called letters of introduction for banking purposes and things of this nature. Again, it was sort of very formal on an informal level if you will. People didn't need government to travel and things like that, and I think the world would be perfectly fine, it would probably be a good thing if we were trying to lean back to that way of doing things. But unfortunately that is not the way that the world works and unfortunately we are in a situation where we are seeing increasing restrictions, scrutiny, just all sorts of oversight if you will and it is almost not even government oversight, it is this kind of weird quasi-governmental sort of supranational oversight that is occurring in the corridors of travel via airports or even by sea or even on rail where you have to deal with International corporations that provide travel services and then they have all these rules that sort of exist sort of supranationally. Saw a lot of this during Covid. It was really, to my mind it was not fun to watch and it was definitely not fun to deal with but we got through all of that.

And one thing coming off of the recent announcement with regard to changes regarding how Thailand views tax liability on offshore income, especially for folks that are living in Thailand, we are seeing some real sea changes with regard to tax and I am seeing more and more how tax is becoming very much intertwined with Immigration. It is almost becoming, I could see a future where the two are inextricably linked especially where we have all these travel documents, so-called vaccine passports - which I have spoken out against time and time again - I do not think that this is a good idea for exactly this reason. If they can track everybody for purposes of a pandemic or for purposes of whatever event that they say that they need to track everybody for, it's not far off that governments who make all their money off of taxing people might start looking at that and say oh there may be avenues to tax people even more effectively by use of these methodologies. 

So the point I am trying to make with regard to this video is, the future looks a little bit Orwellian with regard to how there is going to be this intersection, I think more and more, between Immigration and Tax. And I have always said myself just personally to people, people have asked me over the years, especially other Attorneys oddly, they are like “you are in a really weird sort of niche on your own where you do like a lot of US Immigration work, some tax work”, these are both very narrow fields but they are very deep. Now tax is not so narrow, everybody at the end of the day has to deal with some kind of tax Authority at the end of the day. But that said, in a sense it is narrow because for example United States Tax Law is sort of its own body of Law. It sort of sits off in its own little section, sector off to itself. Immigration is very similar.

So from my standpoint, my analysis in a way, I am kind of uniquely able to analyze both things in the broader context. I have heard it said from time to time that there are people out there that can be at 30,000 ft., come all the way back down to ground level and be able to go back up in their analysis of certain things. That is kind of where I am at now with this Tax and Immigration thing. The point I am trying to make is as time moves on, I think these two things are going to intersect more and more to the point where a lot of this documentation is going to overlap. Now exactly what that looks like in the future remains to be seen, but we will certainly keep you updated on this channel as the situation evolves.