Transcript of the above video:

As the title of this video suggest we are discussing retirement visas specifically recent anecdotal evidence that has come to me through various sources, that Thai Immigration authorities are now tightening up scrutiny associated with Retirement visa applications.

We have discussed these aspects, aspects of this sort of phenomenon, with respect to business visas especially, but Thai education visas, O visas for marriage, in the past but I haven't really done a video in some time specifically regarding Thai retirement visas because quite frankly there wasn't very much to report; the system was fundamentally about the same as it had always been. That being said, it has come to my attention from more than one source that officers at immigration are increasingly scrutinizing applications for Thai retirement visas. Where once renewals of Thai retirement visas, the applications were processed in, for lack of a better term,  a fairly straightforward or routine, streamlined manner if you will. That is not necessarily any longer the case. Heightened scrutiny is being brought to bear in retiree cases. They are looking more carefully and combing over these applications more assiduously than perhaps they once did and that is not to say that in the past they were anyway lax, it is just the regulations are tightening relative to the past. Basically, I think the overall policy is to increase scrutiny, increased enforcement as we have discussed at length on this channel. There have been many crackdowns associated with immigration. To date it would seem that retirees were kind of, I won't say off the hook; because I don’t think that is a correct metaphor, but they were not particularly the focus of scrutiny and enforcement measures. I wouldn't necessarily say they are particularly the focus of increased enforcement activity but I think they are the focus of increased scrutiny. I think yet again just the overall policy of immigration seems to be "we want to make sure everything is by the by-the-book, we want to make certain that everybody is complying with the various requirements of their visa category” and for this reason I think we are seeing this heightened scrutiny. Whether this will remain long-term remains to be seen.

There is another video I did right about the same time as I'm making this video where we discussed Affidavits of income vs. bank accounts with respect to the Thai retirement visa. I urge those who are watching this video to go over and click on that one and check that out because there's some further Insight with respect to some of the details associated with Thai retirement visas. To be clear we are talking about Thai 1-year retirement visa extension renewals. We are not talking necessarily about the new 10 year visa. That seems to have a criteria and sort of a processing nature all of its own but I think it is pretty safe to assume that moving forward we are going to see a more heightened level of scrutiny associated with Thai retirement  visa applications than we did in the relatively recent past.