Transcript of the above video:

As the title of this video suggests, we are posing the question "can foreign YouTubers be targeted by the Revenue Department in Thailand?" Now I thought of making this video after reading a recent article which I will get into and cite and we will do the analysis real quick but yeah let's be clear, I have talked about this a lot. YouTubers are walking a pretty darn fine line out there. Yeah I get it, I've taken a lot of, I won't even call it heat because it doesn't really bother me but a lot of people say "oh you are just trying to scare monger" and "you are just trying to scare people about YouTubing and things." I am really not, I have seen similar scenarios play out where people get used to the laxity in a given system or non-enforcement of relevant Thai Law and think that that is just the way things work when in point of fact, no that is not the way it works. They are just kind of for lack of a better term getting away with it. Again I like YouTube, I like YouTubers; they're good folks, there's nothing wrong with YouTubers. What I am bringing up here I am trying to warn folks that things do not remain the same in Thailand forever. One can get very complacent. Complacency is something that many Expats have to contend with where they just simply think that 'oh because this is the way something,' this is especially the case with non-enforcement. People just sort of think oh because the system isn't really enforcing this rule against me, I don't really need to ever worry about it. I saw this a lot especially with overstayers who just didn't believe the Blacklist was a real thing when they brought that in and then lo and behold, BOOM, people that had been on overstay for thousands of days were deported forever and those folks aren't going to come back; they're Blacklisted. They were in massive overstay and that's exactly Thai Immigration was targeting. Saw this again with folks that were basically living in Thailand on Tourist Visas where they were using them and yeah okay up to that point, it had been pretty permissive to essentially stay long-term in Thailand on a Tourist Visa but when the crackdown came, they were stopping people at land borders who were used to doing their border runs and thinking they were going to go on back to their house after being here years. I talked to multiple people who I like that and boom they were out. They were just told "look come back 6 months, come back a year from now, whatever, but you are clearly not a tourist." So again this non-enforcement is not something to depend on. Detrimental reliance on non-enforcement is not a prudent methodology. 

In any event I thought of making this video after reading a recent article from the Bangkok Post, bangkokpost.com. At first glance this may not seem to auger in favour of the possibility of Revenue Department going after YouTubers but when I read it the hairs on the back of my head went up. I mean they stuck straight up. Quoting directly, the article is titled: Ministry sets targets for tax reform, again Bangkok Post, bangkokpost.com. Quoting directly: "The Ministry will continue to use advanced technologies to improve the tax collection process and provide more convenience to taxpayers, said Mr. Pornchai." And I believe that person is the head of the Revenue Department. Again as usual, anybody who is watching this video, go check out that article, read it in detail to get all the information. I am just quoting a small excerpt here. Then it goes on to say, quote: "Second, tax reform should align with the digital economy." Quoting further: "The Ministry will continue to use advanced technologies to improve the tax collection process and provide more convenience to taxpayers." I repeat that again because that is relevant, because I think this is what they are saying is the Revenue Department kind of understands that up to now, they have been operating under a paradigm and using methodologies that are well kind of antiquated, they are looking backwards to the sort of brick and mortar economy if you will and that was what they concentrated on but now understanding that especially the online economy has exploded especially here in Thailand relative to just a couple of years ago. Quite honestly, the aftermath of the COVID shut down and the influx of Tourists and things and then the explosion of YouTube videos about Thailand has been kind of staggering for somebody like in my position who is just kind of watching this as an observer but kind of in the space if you will, I mean I like to think of us as sort of akin to the NewsHour with Jim Lehrer PBS back home, back in the States where we are just trying to provide up-to-date, good information and I like to think I try to do it as a impartially as I can. But then watching the proliferation of travel bloggers and things and all of this this stuff is exploding. Revenue Department is not unaware of this. As I discussed in another video pertaining to the so-called Exit Tax which does not look like it is going to be imposed but as I discussed in that video and I will discuss here, this does seem to be an overarching theme with the Revenue Department right now here in Thailand that "hey we need to start drumming up the revenue." As Puff Daddy said in the movie Get Him to the Greek, "we need to thicken our revenue stream, we need to thicken the F out of that stream." That may be what is going on here. Very possibly Thai Revenue Department is looking around saying: ”look we have had some depleted Revenue issues and we need to be looking for some more revenue streams." As I said in that video and I will say it again, maybe one way to make sure that you have got continuous tax revenue is to not shut everyone's businesses down for 2 and 1/2 years, that might be a good way to keep that from happening again, just food for thought but this theme, this is something that I don't think YouTubers should just dismiss out of hand. The minute I read this excerpt I was like "ooh what does that mean exactly?" And the first thing that popped into my head was hey Revenue Department may be seeing the activities of YouTubers out there and they can get online just like anybody else and go over to those websites that show how much money a given channel for example may be making and as a result they may be sitting there saying hey we need to find some new enforcement protocols so that we can go ahead and get in on that action basically, so we can go ahead and start collecting some taxes for the activity, economic activity if you will, work activity; as we have discussed in many other videos, the definition of work is very broad in Thailand so this also has implications from the standpoint of Thai Labour Law as well as Tax Law. 

The thing to take away from this video and I think it's not being overly concerned or scare mongering is yeah I definitely think Revenue Department officials are probably going to be looking and taking far more proactive measures to gain tax revenue from the digital economy.