Transcript of the above video:

As the title of this video suggests, we are discussing Permanent Residence Applications with a specific eye on Thai Corporate Documentation? What are we talking about here? Well, in a sense we deal with a number of PR cases every year. For those who are unaware, the Permanent Residence window generally opens in the fourth quarter, so there is a window for application, it generally opens in the fourth quarter of a given calendar year. So presumably here in Thailand, we are sitting here at the end of June at the time of this video and we would probably be looking at I would suspect September, October maybe even November, December before they actually open the window to accept PR applications. 

Something to take away from this video, do not wait until they open the window to get your ducks in a row to file. It is a really good idea to prepare your application, I mean some of these applications are like a phone book. I am not even kidding. I mean some of these are really thick; you have got a lot of documentation in there, I'll get to the corporate stuff here in a minute, but there is ID documentation which needs to be certified etc.; a lot of documentation associated with getting Permanent Residence here in the Kingdom of Thailand. So for that reason, it's a good idea to sort of put together your petition early and often for lack of a better term. 

Now with respect to Thai Corporate documentation specifically, what we are talking about here is generally speaking when proving up one's work history in Thailand which is oftentimes a major component of a Thai Permanent Residence application, the applicant will need to put together a lot of Corporate Documentation oftentimes showing that they worked at a given place for a given period of time. Sometimes they may want to see exactly what that person has being paid. There is various corporate documentation associated with Permanent Residence. 

Now this is kind of where we hit a fork in the road. We deal with folks who both work in Thailand on what I sometimes call “expat packages” or just they have just been working in Thailand for a number of years for a Thai corporation or a Multinational Corporation, Corporate Documentation can be kind of a difficult thing to put together because oftentimes we find that we have to liaise with somebody, usually an administrator within a given corporation to obtain the documentation that we need. This can cause delays in the overall compilation of the petition; it can also lead to a little bit of consternation between employer and employee within Thailand regarding issues of "we need to get this documentation out there", "this documentation is going to be provided to the government"; that makes a lot of companies very uneasy. So sometimes what we see in these cases are, the cases where it is somebody who is employed by another Company, those cases can be a little bit more time consuming frankly just to get the documentation together oftentimes. Meanwhile, those who are self-employed in Thailand, I am not saying it's easier because in many ways it's not, it's a matter of still proving up documentation etc., but the main issue is that if it's your own company, if you set up the company or you are partner in a company but you essentially can control the promulgation of documentation within that corporation, that is going to probably put you in a little bit better position compared to someone who has to go to an employer and is kind of at that employer's mercy to produce that documentation. 

So something to kind of think about. I am not saying it is always better to be self-employed when it comes to Permanent Residence but there are pros and cons and oftentimes, at least from our perspective where we are having to help compile the petition, yeah sometimes the pros far outweigh the cons when you are dealing with somebody who is essentially self-employed through a Company they either own in whole or in part.