Transcript of the above video: 

As the title of this video suggests, we are discussing, well we are discussing basically Tax and Immigration Policy, how that is changing basically the overall framework of Immigration and what that's going to look like moving forward. 

So what are we talking about here? Overstay. We all know what Immigration overstay is. You get a visa, or you are stamped into Thailand in what's called a Visa Exemption Stamp, so you just get a stamp, you are stamped in, you have 60 days on arrival; you have a Destination Thailand Visa, boom, you come in, you get your six months; you have a Business Visa, boom, you come in for either 90 days or you come in and you have some extension like Retirement, Business, Marriage, and you come in for the duration of that extension if you had a reentry permit prior to leaving the Kingdom before. So we all know what overstay is. If you go out past the validity of that type of stamp - basically your lawful status stamp here in Thailand - you are in overstay. Each day of overstay accrues fines and a certain amount of time in overstay can accrue different types of penalties up to and including blacklisting as well as longer periods of time blacklisted, as well as effective lifetime bans. If caught in Thailand committing a crime while on overstay that leads to an automatic - effectively an automatic - five-year ban. Even if you are not committing a crime by the way, if you are just caught within Thailand in overstay, that in and of itself can lead to a five-year ban, again depending on circumstances. If you go through the airport, generally speaking they are not going to impose that, what we call "voluntary departure" in the vernacular of US Immigration, but we have even seen that be kind of a grey thing because some people have been picked up, especially in Phuket, at the airport. The point I'm trying to make is we know what overstay is. 

Now what are we talking about with regard to tax? Well we now know, they are trying to roll out this tax system. I think legally speaking they haven't been able to roll it out effectively or they have not perfected promulgation of codified law regarding these matters in such a way that it effectively attaches tax liability to broad swaths of the overall expat or otherwise population. As I've gotten into in many other videos, and I am sure I'll be discussing at length into the future as well. But long story short, I have also discussed the fact that I think 2025 is the DMZ year. It is probably the last year you're going to be able to claim all this kind of legal and basically procedural and formality kind of technical issues with this thing. Moving forward I don't think that there is going to be the same platform to do that. So what does that mean? Well what that means is for 2025 - again it's kind of a limbo year to my mind - but it looks clearly to me like after this calendar year, Thai Immigration and the Revenue Department and various other Government agencies I imagine as well, will probably work hand in glove to create a system that will effectively work like a digitized version of the Tax Clearance Certificate here in Thailand whereby they basically know how long you've been in Thailand. And pursuant to Thai Law, if there were any type of taxable events that occurred during that period, they may be able to say "hey you need to pay something before you are able to leave." But until that time comes, we're still in this kind of limbo period. So where are we at with respect to this here in Thailand? Well one, I think into the next calendar year, the notion of a “tax overstay” here in Thailand is something to keep well in one's mind because yeah that 180-day mark is going to be a big determining factor in any kind of analysis regarding underlying possible assessability or liability regarding taxes here in Thailand. So again, the thing to understand and the thing to keep in mind is this is being tied in with Immigration too okay, especially in the Destination Thailand Visa. I am not going to get into sort of my background and all that; I know people find me controversial I guess on the Destination Thailand Visa. Look, I just like to be circumspect with new programs from Immigration or any - in this case this came from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs primarily - but of anything that is rolled out by any Government because I don't just take it at face value that it is intended for or will work the way that they say it's going to work. Call me skeptical, I guess. 

That being said, again now we are dealing with dealing with two kinds of overstay in Thailand. You need to worry about your Visa, you also need to worry about the 180-day mark here in Thailand in order to ascertain whether or not you want to deal with something with regard to taxes. I actually created an app to deal with this. We created something some time ago and I will be rolling it back out. For those who want to know about that, go ahead and shoot me an email, I'll get you something on that. But that said, moving forward especially going into 2026 - this year again kind of a limbo sort of DMZ year - but especially going into 2026, taxes are definitely going to be something to keep in mind when you are dealing with your stay, when you are dealing with living, expatriating, being a nomad - whatever you want to call it out here in Southeast Asia - it's something that's going to come up and again, it's not just going to be a situation I expect moving forward where Border Running is going to be utilized only for Immigration purposes, I expect more and more moving forward, Border Running is going to have tax implications as well.