Transcript of the above video:

As the title of this video suggests, we are discussing Thai Retirement Visas, specifically so-called long-stay or Long Term Residence Visas, not residence visas in the traditional sense. For those who watch this video or this channel frequently, I have been talking about this ad nauseam. These LTR Visas or Golden Visas also called Long-Term Residence Visas don't really provide long-term residence. They provide essentially a really long Visa and we are getting a clearer picture as to what this looks like. A big question I have been getting asked a lot is "Will those seeking a Retirement Visa, have to essentially volunteer for a tax audit in Thailand?" Let me explain what we are talking about and the best way to do that comes from a small excerpt from the Pattaya Mail, pattayamail.com, the article is titled: Thailand's 10 year Visas will be launched September 1. This is kind of an old article but they bring up something that we are starting to see manifest I guess. Quoting directly and I urge those who are watching this video, check out that article in detail, I am going to quote a small excerpt. Quoting directly: "The LTR has detailed rules for the nomads including showing a detailed contract proving earnings over the past two years and reporting annually to the Thai Inland Revenue. Inland Revenue, I think that is the British way of saying like the IRS in the United States, Internal Revenue Service. In any event yes it is the Revenue Department here in Thailand.

They are talking about this specifically in the context of so-called digital nomads and basically folks that are working in Thailand, there is a different tax scheme that has been set up for those folks and they don't need to deal with quite the tax, well I am going to make other videos on this probably not this week but get kind of get into the high weeds on the comparison of the tax liability and actual practical tax liability associated with just kind of standard visas. The point of this video is they are talking about the Digital Nomad visas or the Professional Visas, whatever you want to call them, and they are not ostensibly talking about the Retirement Visa in that excerpt. So there are actually two retiree categories associated with this LTR scheme but the question is “will these Retirement categories have to report to the Revenue Department?” I don't know the answer to that yet. We are still kind of mulling that out; we are still sussing that out, we can't figure out exactly where things stand with regard to this. A lot of this is still pretty opaque. Again not really anybody's fault, it has just come online. That said, it seems a little odd that some categories would need to deal with the Revenue Department and others wouldn't because the sole reason for this is people are going to be staying here long term.

As we have discussed in other videos on this channel, there can be tax they can be taxed obligations just associated with being in Thailand, being tax resident in Thailand, being in Thailand over 183 days per year, per calendar year. So again there are tax implications merely associated with physical presence. Thus far it appears tax is a major component associated with so-called visas for "digital nomads" in a long-term capacity but it remains to be seen and again even that is pretty murky at the moment, so bear with us, but it remains to be seen whether or not there is the same liability or the same obligation I should say attached to the retiree categories for these long-term residents and that just remains to be seen. So as soon as we have more information on that and I have gotten a lot of correspondence, people really want to know on this topic, I will try to suss this out and get a video out as soon as I can.