Transcript of the above video: 

As the title of this video suggests, we are discussing Immigration's paradigm on retirement versus working, and this is coming up more and more. We are seeing problems with the DTV, especially in the banking zone, because as I have discussed in other videos, frankly that was the brainchild of primarily Pheu Thai's Ministry of Foreign Affairs in the last government, where they purely created that in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and sort of foisted it on internal Immigration, the Destination Thailand Visa I should say, and there are issues with work authorization that is causing people to either not be able to get bank accounts or they are seeing their bank accounts closed because Immigration or I should say Ministry of Interior internally said, "hey you can't do anything that impinges upon the Thai economy. 

It's my opinion that probably the DTV is at least going to be heavily scrutinized, possibly changed heavily, or maybe even we will see it kind of mothball in coming weeks and months. Again that's not a forgotten conclusion but understand, it purely was the brainchild of the prior Administration and it is not really all that fit to purpose. I know this makes DTV holders angry, especially with me, whatever. I'm just speaking my mind here based on the analysis of the situation as it appears to me, and it was not well thought out. And it does not integrate all the systems of immigration the way that most visas do or visas heretofore always have. And for that reason, I could definitely see situations arise where it falls into disuse, let's put it that way. 

Now that said, the reason for the video is the delineation in the mind of immigration between retirement and working. And at the end of the day, immigration's position is if you are retiring and Thailand, you're retiring in Thailand; if you are working in Thailand, you're working in Thailand. They are two different things. The Retirement Visa as the name implies, it's for being retired. You bring in passive income or bring in a lump sum of 800,000 Baht and you can remain in Thailand in Retirement Visa status, roll that over on a yearly basis and just be here retired. If you want to work though, you have to get work authorization, you have to get tax certification in order to pay taxes and work here. That to this point has always been the paradigm. 

My personal opinion a lot of this change in paradigm we've seen the last two years was largely the results of undue foreign influence and I think that there is a good chance a lot of that will be rolled back and we will start to see this more again clearly defined sort of black and white, retirement versus working paradigm, applied moving forward for a variety of different reasons most notably all the consternation being caused by the possibility of all this tax stuff. It was a lot easier in the past to just say look, you have a Work Permit, you have a Tax ID, you pay tax. If you don't, you have a Retirement Visa, you are just here on passive income or you are here using your lump sum to prove financial ability, you are not working here. Pretty easy and basically the Tax Authorities can concentrate on those who they need to collect taxes from. 

I think that is, I'm not saying I can predict the future, but I could see a scenario where that is the way it plays out in the future in terms of re-delineating between those who are working in Thailand versus those who are retired here in Thailand.