Transcript of the above video:

In this video, I'm going to briefly discuss the mandatory nature of e-filing of various tax filings for companies registered here in Thailand. In the past, anybody who has done business in Thailand or has ever dealt with Thai immigration or has ever dealt with Thai government at all, most people would tell you that this is definitely a government which loves paperwork.

Paperwork seems to be ubiquitous and there seems to be a mountain of paperwork for virtually any endeavor one wishes to undertake with respect to getting things done here in Thailand. Recently, in 2016 basically, e-filing of certain tax documentation such as the audited financial statement became mandatory and it has resulted in some overall changes with respect to how corporate service providers such as our division deals with these things. It has decreased the amount of paperwork to be done as is mentioned in another video on this channel.

There is a requirement that corporate tax filings, one of them to be maintained on a monthly basis, certain tax filings have to be dealt with on a yearly basis most notably corporate income tax, usually has to be dealt with on a year-to-year basis.

With respect to audited financial statements, those have to be by law filed once a year with respect to the company and failure to do so can result in a criminal warrant being issued. It's not something to mess around with respect to these compliance issues. And I must say that this latest move to sort of move everything more to an e-filing platform, in my opinion that's going to be a very good thing because it's going to reduce the amount of paperwork. You know, paper everywhere, constantly dealing with a barrage of paper.

But the other side of the coin is there is an issue with respect to e-filing I think down the road with respect to compliance because things that were once, sort of, for lack of better term view just not worth the time to deal with, you know, little nickpicking things with respect to one's filings. Now that these things are going to be e-filed, it's going to result in a much tighter system with respect to the overall revenue and tax here in Thailand.

So in a sense, the way in which immigration about 18 months two years ago from the time of this filming, the way immigration sort of fundamentally went through an overall in the way in which the immigration visas are scrutinized, individuals are scrutinized at the airport here in Thailand, etcetera when coming through a port of entry where Thailand essentially within about 18 months went from a fairly, I won't say antiquated, but a system that operated much more in the paradigm of 25 to 30 years ago, almost overnight seem to make a leap into the 21st century. I think this is probably going to happen with respect to tax filings and compliance as well and I think e-filing is just sort of the first step, the first glimpse of what we're going to see down the road.

So keep in mind corporate services and corporate service providers are extremely important with respect to maintaining compliance. As it would appear to me, the enforcement apparatus with respect to Revenue Department and Department of Business Development that enforcement apparatus I think is going to be a lot more scrutinizing and I think that scrutiny is going to be facilitated by the fact that these e-filings are mandatory.