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Office Photos for Thai Business Visa Extension Application

Transcript of the above video:

As a title of this video suggests we are discussing Thai B visa extensions. We are specifically discussing office photographs in the context open application for talking about extensions of an application for Thai Business Visa extension. 

For those who are unaware, in Thailand, there are two documents which will maintain one's ability to conduct business here in the Kingdom. Those two documents are one's Business Visa and that Business Visa then acts as a platform for a Thai Work Permit. Now there are some exceptions to this rule most notably the recently-created Smart Visa which basically intertwines the work authorization component with the Immigration status so in a sense, work authorization is inherent to the Smart Visa itself.  We have done other videos on this channel. I urge those who are interested in the Smart Visa to go to the search function in our channel and just look up Smart Visa. 

But today we are talking about the standard Business Visa with Work Permit. More in the context of small to medium-sized enterprises, or SMEs, and I say that because most bigger corporations here in Thailand that are employing foreigners they either may be certified under the Board of Investment scheme, the BOI, or they may be of such a scale they may be large enough that they can avail themselves of the One Stop service center here in Thailand. Again while there is still a separation between one's immigration and work authorization status, at the One Stop service center you are dealing with everything sort of all at once and while it is not intertwined, it is close enough. It is pretty close to sort of combining those two documents. 

So with respect to Thai Business visa extensions, we are talking about office photographs. Anytime you go and apply for a business visa extension here in Thailand or I should say especially with respect to Chaengwattana, although these regulations are country-wide, different Immigration Officers are going to take a different approach to dealing with this on a regulatory and administrative level so what works in Chiang Mai, Phuket or Pattaya may not necessarily work in Bangkok; vice versa. That being said, here in Bangkok the office photos are important. Office photos are pretty well necessary everywhere but not a month goes by that I don't get a call from someone stating that their B visa extension application has been sort of held up and it has been held up with respect to issues involving the office photos. Usually what is going on here is I usually find it is a DIY situation,  it is a do-it-yourself person who is applying for their B Visa extension and no offense to those folks and certainly that is everyone's prerogative, it is probably good idea to contact a legal professional with respect to this stuff. The applications can get quite thick. It is a rather Byzantine process at times and things like these photos can really be exasperating because people don't really understand what the Immigration Officer wants to see in these photos so they take photos and then they are kind of useless so the Immigration Officer sends them away. There are requirements. They are not exactly hard and fast but things like the Company's name needs to be in the photographs, things like the address etc. It needs to be the actual person's place of work and that needs to be indicated in the photos themselves. To some extent and I hesitate to use this phrase but understand the context in which I am using it, to some extent the photos are staged in that nobody really naturally takes photos of themselves working. That is not really a natural thing to do so yes to some extent you know you are sort of staging, this is my office, this is where I work, with the people I work with, etc., but they are not staged in the sense that it isn't the genuine work place of the individual in question. So they need to be in a photo of the actual work place that is delineated in the application forms and is the place where work is actually taking place but yeah to some extent you know we usually take photos for our clients and there are certain angles to where you want to see certain things.  If it is a certain type of business you oftentimes want to get whatever they are doing in the background. If it is a restaurant they are going to want to see somebody in an actual restaurant. It is not going to be the back office of the restaurant. They oftentimes want to see that person out on the floor. That is just one example of many. For this reason, there is a kind of inherent complexity to these office photos.  It can be exasperating when having these denied. You trying to file for a B Visa extension and they say "no, you have to go and retake the photos."  They oftentimes cite what they want to see and folks don't really understand why they are doing that. Well they have their own protocols; they need to see certain information in each of these photos and for that reason it is important from an efficiency standpoint that the photos are taken correctly at the time the first batch is made so as to sort of avoid any waste of time and resources.