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American Citizens Services Appointments: Residence Affidavits in Thailand

Transcript of the above video:

As the title of this video suggests, we are discussing Residence Affidavits that are obtained from the American Citizen Services Section of the United States Embassy here in Thailand. 

Now these types of documents could be either obtained from the US Embassy here in Bangkok or the US Consulate in Chiang Mai. What are these documents? What specifically are we talking about? Well for certain things like for example a driving license in Thailand as well as other types of documentation which one may be trying to obtain here in Thailand, you may need to get what is called a Residence Affidavit and the US Embassy generally speaking will issue such a document. So for example you would make an appointment with American Citizen Services at the US Embassy or Consulate you are wishing to go to and go ahead and fill out and have that document notarized by that Office to then go ahead and use that in whatever capacity you are looking to use it for here in Thailand.  Generally speaking depending on what you are going to use it for here in Thailand, for example a Thai driving license, you may need to go ahead and then deal with certain formalities under the Thai system to have that document become usable for purposes of Thai legal matters.

The thing to take away from this video is, here recently we have seen changes to the appointment system for making appointments at American Citizen Services and those changes, in my opinion, are stemming from the fact that they are no longer issuing the Income Affidavits for use in Thai Immigration matters. That is a thing of the past. I have made multiple videos on that over the course of the last roughly eighteen months. I am not going to go into detail on that here but suffice it to say the result of this change is fewer appointments, slots in my opinion are being put out in order to be used by Americans wishing to go down to American Citizen Services. The reason for this is it at one time, due to the usage of those Income Affidavits  you had a lot more people wishing to go to ACS at any given time. Now the office is trying to come up with the happy medium if you will; the amount of appointments that they should give availability for and the actual demand for such appointments out in the community here; the expat community here in Thailand. 

I think that this is still an ongoing thing. I think there is a bit of a learning curve going on here so I think ultimately this will come to a sort of an equilibrium but for now the thing to take away from this is where once, well we go back a while ago it was possible to just walk into American Citizen Services. I mean there were security protocols but there was an ability to go in on a first-come first-serve basis in order to undertake services at ACS. They decided I think due to security and efficiency protocols, they wanted to go ahead and institute an appointment system. They have done so. Now to be clear, it is possible to get in to deal with something on an emergency basis if it is a genuine emergency. Barring that, it is not possible to just walk into American Citizen Services. 

The thing to take away from this video is that American Citizen Services and the Residence Affidavit that you will need where once it was possible to kind of presume “I can trying to get that done in a week; maybe 10 days”, now due to the number of appointments they have available and the demand for appointments, I think you are looking at 10 days at an absolute minimum.  I haven't gotten an appointment at fast in some time now. I think 2-3 weeks at a minimum you are looking at to go ahead and get an appointment to get in to get this documentation certified in order to use it here in Thailand. So take that as you will. We will do some updates on this topic in the future as things materially change so stay tuned to this channel.