Transcript of the above video:

As the title of this video suggests, we are discussing certified documentation or foreign verification of documentation used in Thailand. This will happen a lot when you are dealing with something like Permanent Residence in Thailand; there is foreign documentation certification associated for example with Thai O Marriage Visas, and again Permanent Residence. When I dealt with my citizenship, there was a lot of documentation that had to be certified by the American Government. Again there is going to be documentation that is issued by overseas authorities or institutions overseas that sometimes Thai Authorities are going to want to see certified by the foreign government.

I got to thinking of making this video after reading a recent article from the Pattaya Mail, that is pattayamail.com, the article is titled: Pattaya Grapevine: A forgotten Brit-Thai Connection, under the subheading: Verifying documents. Quoting directly: A reader asked why his Bangkok Embassy can verify his passport or home country driving license but not his degree qualifications. Embassies here won't confirm the authenticity of documents issued outside of Thailand as they have no access to the necessary files. But passports and driving licenses are the exception in most Embassies because they do share the Government's home country data bases." Yeah, again driving license and to be quite honest, I have never seen in my time here, a driving license in the United States be verified by the Embassy here. I don't know if they would verify a copy of that. I doubt it, it's issued by the State Government, the Embassies operate at the Federal level. I would doubt they would do it but it might be possible. That said, a good point is brought up here. I urge those who are watching this video to check out that article because this is an excerpt, there is a lot of good information in there. 

But yeah, generally speaking the main document that we see certified frequently are things like for example a US Passport. We oftentimes see that in association with Certification under the US-Thai Treaty of Amity but yeah it is not real common. The Embassy is not going to certify a document that the Government didn't issue. They might not even certify a document the Government did issue depending on circumstances at least in the case of the Americans, I believe in this case they are talking about more just coming from a British perspective but the Americans aren't too dissimilar when it comes to this insofar as yeah it is going to be difficult to get certification of certain types of documents especially things like Education Certification, that kind of thing. Now it may be possible to still get that certified to the liking of the Thai Government but that may require a local notary back in for example the State where a document was generated and then you have got to go ahead and get counter certifications from any relevant authorities that the Thai Government deems necessary in order to consider it a verified document. So again, it is going to be circumstantially dependent but it is an issue that does come up quite frequently for expats here in Thailand and that issue is Certification of Foreign Documents.