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Thai and American Banks Share Expat Account Information

Transcript of the above video:

In this video today as the title suggests we are discussing, not necessarily recent developments regarding banking information being shared between Thai and US Authorities as these developments have come about within about the last two years but that being said I haven’t done a video specifically on this topic and it is of, my opinion, probably of significant relevance to many of the viewers of this channel so I figured I would go ahead and jump into this topic.

Basically, a couple of years ago, and I was trying to find some articles regarding this matter from sources such as the Nation and the Bangkok Post or some of the other publications of record here in the Kingdom, but I couldn’t really find one. However I did find something on this: “Thailand Strengthens Tax Bonds with USA”. This was published March 8, 2016. It comes from the website www.iexpats.com. Quoting directly; “Thailand is the latest nation to reinforce tax treaties to expose the financial secrets of US expats to the internal Revenue Service (IRS). The Ambassador in Bangkok, Glyn Davies, and Thai Finance Minister, Apisak Tantivorawong, signed the agreement that cements the pledge that Thailand’s financial institutions have to file information about accounts and investments held by US expats in the country.” Quoting further: “The agreement also allows the Thai government to receive financial information about expats in the USA.”

The reason I did this is this is sort of further information with respect to things like FATCA, the Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act and the Foreign Bank Account Reporting, FBARs which are sometimes required by expats living abroad; filings need to be made with respect to bank accounts held abroad. The thing to take away from this is Thailand is by no stretch of the imagination considered by anyone to be anything akin to a tax haven. It is certainly not akin to anything that could be described as an offshore jurisdiction with the exception of a few rather niche situations where parking assets or things like this in Thailand can be a benefit; it is usually not. Thailand is a pretty transparent jurisdiction with respect to foreign jurisdiction and the financial assets of those with citizenship of foreign jurisdiction.

The thing to take away from this video is that Thailand is not keeping any secrets from the US. Bank accounts here in Thailand, those that hold them, that information is going to be reported back to the United States so those who have bank accounts and need to be doing their FBARs, it is probably a good idea to get into compliance with that because that information is being remitted to the United States Authorities. Now how the authorities in the United States

compile and collate that information and correlate it to the various folks that are physically present abroad, that remains to be seen as a practical matter but that being said, I thought it was a good idea to go ahead and do this video as I have had people talk to me just sort of on a one-to-one level and basically not understand the implications of the fact that “Yes the United States and Thai Financial Institutions are sharing financial information with each other’s respective tax authorities” so for that reason it is not particularly reasonable to expect that that is going to end any time soon and it could have implications for those who are banking here in the Kingdom of Thailand.