Transcript of the above video: 

One of the more recent videos I did regarding tax here in Thailand, I was pretty down in the dumps. I do appreciate some of the messages I got from folks asking, "are you alright?"  Yeah, it wasn't the greatest day just sort of all around. Then on top of it, talking about tax stuff, I just wasn't in the best of moods. It's also pretty galling and frustrating and just kind of trying, to see people who have no legal ability and are unqualified and quite honestly are operating criminally, talking about all this tax stuff and then everybody runs out and talks about that as if that is the facts. Again, I don't want to get too deep down into legal analysis on specific facts because again things are going to be driven by facts in a given case. But again, going back, I was getting a little bit down in the prior video. I appreciate people's messages, but this is kind of frustrating stuff. Tax isn't anything I really want to be talking about all that much to begin with. But to clarify something I said in a prior video, I said I may or may not be going to Pattaya City Expat Club. Yeah, that was confirmed, so yeah, I will be going to that one way or the other. Now I doubt I'm going to be saying much different than anything I say in my videos, so anybody that's like looking to go to that and think that they're going to find some Epiphany out of me, that's not really going to be the case I don't think. It's largely going to be sort of a summarization of basically things I have talked about on this channel. And that brings me to the title of this video which is, "you wanted free tax advice, well you got what you paid for." 

I've had all kinds of people send me all kinds of hate and then put up all kinds of hateful reviews about us because we won't provide free tax advice without people paying for it, so then they run out and give us horrible reviews and say how terrible we are, and blah, blah, blah. I always find that funny because it's always people that haven't paid us, haven't retained us to do anything. But then meanwhile, the underlying problem is you're doing yourself a disservice. What I am talking about here is, look I'm not dying on the hill of 'Nobody has to go get a tax ID number'. That's never what I have said. What I have said is one) I think the vast majority of especially retirees here, this isn't going to impact you whatsoever. Two) I've also said everything is dependent on the underlying facts in a case. I get it. There are other Thai qualified legal professionals out there that are saying this is how it is, and it is a one-size-fits-all analysis. Okay fine. I can't fault somebody qualified to give that kind of advice, but I can seriously question it because I can say from purely an American context, or any kind of context, looking at Comparative Tax Law, how do you in a professional capacity say anything is always the case. That isn't how it works. Meanwhile, there's this other presumption out there that merely receiving a Bank Wire is somehow a taxable event, which I don't know when that occurred, okay? It's the underlying funds, the reason, again what are they?

Then the other thing I'm seeing a lot of out there is people talking about income and what that is. A lot of nonsense surrounding the whole notion of income, the definition of income, all of this kind of stuff, but circling back to the point of this video, one of the biggest problems with this is a bunch of people that wanted a bunch of free advice, and they wanted it in such a way that it is one-size-fits-all. That's what this comes down to and here's the reason it's a problem. It's stampeding people into the thing you folks don't want to begin with. By seeking the free advice and listening to it and then getting your chest all puffed out and I see you as trolls all across some of my channels, or across some of my videos and puffing out your chest and saying, 'well he's going to back away because this person came in and said this is how it is!' You know, I've never changed my original position which is look again it's all dependent on the underlying facts, and I think the vast majority of folks - especially foreigners here in Thailand that come from countries with double tax agreements - you are probably not going to have to worry about this to begin with. And again, I find the analysis that, oh this is how it is; everybody has to do X, Y and Z, I find that very spurious especially when you consider the fact there is no affirmative duty to file a tax return in Thailand to begin with. They are trying to change that under this push to do all this OECD nonsense - which I'm very much hoping gets at least sidelined or we table it and take a long, long deep breath on whether or not this is good for Thailand long term rather than just talk about and trying to implement it - but this “free” tax advice is part of the process of stampeding people into a system that they will create by your own panic and by your own desire to not seek narrowly tailored tax advice to your specific circumstances. That's what's going to drive this because a bunch of people, as it sits right now, you stampede a bunch of people into the system right now, most of them aren’t going to have to pay anything okay? That's the fact of it. They don't owe anything to Thailand. They are just going to have to process a bunch of paperwork. As it sits, the system doesn't really want to do that, but if you stampede a bunch of people through, you may end up with a system - in fact I think it's getting more likely - I'll get into that in a moment and in some other videos that I am making contemporaneously with this one for later release - but yeah you may end up in a system where you are tracked, traced and totalitarianly taxed, based on every microsecond you are in Thailand on the long term. If that's what you want, go do it. Go stampede yourselves into that corral under the, I don't know what you want to call it, the influence of the pied pipers being these foreign interloping tax agents of foreign government tax authorities, who are trying to put you into that corral. If that's where you want to be, well have at it Hoss, but at the end of the day that's where this stuff leads; that's where one size fits-all analysis leads; that's where all of this allowing folks to illegally come in here and advise people here in Thailand of tax matters, that's where it leads. To totalitarianism because that, at the end of the day, is what one-size-fits-all tax advice is.