Transcript of the above video:

In this video today, we're going to pick up where we've left off in a couple of prior videos with respect to how customs is getting tighter here in the Kingdom. In a recent article from the Bangkok Post, article was published October 9th, 2017, the title of the article is “Customs orders tax collectors to declare assets.” To quote directly, “The customs department is requiring senior officials responsible for tax collection to declare their assets to the finance ministry in a bid to increase transparency. Targeted officials must declare their assets when their positions change, said Director General Kulit Sombatsiri.

Under Mr. Kulit’s leadership, the customs department has pushed efforts to improve transparency and stem loopholes used for tax avoidance. It has revamped the inspection process and discouraging goods and carrying out tax evaluations shifting from an individual model to a team based one. The reason I bring this up is not so much to go into the fact that they're not going to require certain office holders within the customs department to declare their assets when transferring jobs etc. It's more to just provide a general overview about how the customs enforcement mechanism in Thailand is being brought up to date in a lot of ways. They're modernizing it in a lot of ways and they've also changed a number of laws with respect to customs and a number of practices which we’ll go into sort of in depth in other videos on this channel most notably things like the way in which they've changed; there's sort of a bounty method within the customs department whereby individuals who discover shipments being brought in and are trying to avoid customs duties get sort of a percentage of the customs duty to be levied.

This has changed. It's not gone away but they've changed the way they calculate that. Just in general across the board, matters pertaining to customs and the enforcement of the laws and rules regarding customs it's just simply getting stricter and it's something to think about for those who are in like the import-export business or for example those who are in a business that require imports into Thailand of certain goods. Customs, I'm not going to say is getting more difficult to deal with them, it's just going to be more complex I guess in a way. And also, it's very clear that they no longer are going to tolerate, for lack of better term, corruption within the customs service and for that reason, they're implementing these changes.

And I think it's pretty safe to say we can pretty much expect to see a more beefed up customs mechanism here in the Kingdom of Thailand. And I think it's pretty safe to say that there's going to be an increase in the amount of customs duties that are collected in Thailand. Now that's not to say the customs duty or the percentages are you know the duty to be paid is going to go up but I think the volume of duties assessed is going to go up because of the increased scrutiny and the heightening of the enforcement mechanism here which is going to go ahead and allow for just a larger volume of duties to be assessed.