Transcript of the above video:

As the title of this video suggests, we are discussing an outbound travel tax from Thailand? What are we talking about? I thought of making this video after reading a recent article from the Bangkok Post, bangkokpost.com, the article is titled: Thailand Ponders Reviving Outbound Travel Tax. Quoting directly: "The Revenue Department is studying the feasibility of reviving an outbound travel tax on Thai Nationals. Officials are researching practices in other countries, especially developed nations, that have similar taxes in place, said Pinsai Suraswadi, Director-general of the Department. Thailand has imposed a departure tax on all travellers, Thai and foreign, since 2007. Currently 700 baht, it is automatically included in the price of international air tickets. The outbound travel tax, if adopted, would be collected separately." 

Well if you watched any of our prior videos on all of this talk of tax, trying to do the Tourist Tax this that and the other thing, there is a deep sort of history here with regard to this and there is actually some exposition of that in the article from the Bangkok Post and I urge those who are watching this video go check that out for more detail. But in the past, they had this thing called the Tax Clearance Certificate System that they utilized here in Thailand. That was sort of replaced by the VAT. Now for whatever reason there is this big push to get tax revenue up. The big push comes from the fact that oh I don't know, they shut down the entire economy for 3 years for an exaggerated "pandemic" where they in an unprecedented manner shut down everybody's businesses, told people they couldn't basically operate economically at all and then the government was super surprised that, "oh my gosh, we don't have tax revenue", because there is no cash flow running through the economy at all. That is basically what caused this if you really want to look at why tax revenue is down. But that said, governments don't care about the cause, they just want the money. So, they are looking at every which way they can come up with to sort of figure out how to replicate that cash flow coming into their coffers and I think that they are looking at sort of reviving the Tax Clearance System. 

As we have discussed in other videos, the whole Thai Tax ID issue has come up in the past. Depending on your circumstances, you may or may not need to get a Thai Tax ID if you are considered tax resident here in Thailand. And there is an entire legal analysis that goes into that which I am not going to get into on this video, and frankly you should only gain such advice from a Thai reputable professional who has experience and qualification in that area. But long story short, I find this interesting if only because it looks like they are kind of grasping at straws to figure out a way to upstate revenues.

Again, as I have said in videos before regarding the whole notion of a Tourist Tax etc., I think it puts a bad taste in people's mouths, I think it sends the wrong message. JFK actually showed in his administration that when you reduce taxes, government revenue actually goes up which people kind of get that. If you make an economy conducive to inbound cash flow, and conducive to business, you will see more people want to come and do business there and you can leave your sort of tax rate “stagnant” if you want to call it that from a bureaucrat’s perspective, you can leave your rates stagnant and actually you will see the revenue go up. 

Long story short, it remains to be seen where this goes but we will certainly keep you updated on this channel as the situation evolves.