Transcript of the above video:

As the title of this video suggests, we are discussing the purpose of 90-day reporting. Oftentimes it is not the best thing to question the purpose of things that bureaucracies do, not because it's a bad thing to question it from the standpoint of 'is this a good idea? is this effective?' Those are reasonable questions that reasonable people can have. Bureaucracies are not reasonable per se. Bureaucracies are like a glacial mob if you will and by mob I mean like a big group of people that does things that are irrational but instead of being like a mob like you see on the street, a mob of people that goes crazy about some issue or just goes crazy generally and riots or does something like this, they are like glacial; they just sort of exist over time and then they put out directives and protocols that don't make a lot of sense sometimes. That being said, the 90 day reporting thing, it is a product of laws, I'll get into in a moment, but I think you could throw this in the sort of file of nonsensical things that kind of get institutionalized.

I thought of making this video after reading a recent comment on our channel. "Out of pure curiosity, what purpose is the 90 days reporting sir? I understand the point of TM30. If a tourists can't be reached, for example by relatives during their stay, Authorities can at least provide information of where a person's latest reported location was and have somewhere to start looking. But the 90-day reporting, for say someone on a retirement or other long stay Visa? After 3 months you can literally be anywhere in the world. How is this information useful to the authorities or anyone else?" Well first of all, point in fact, maybe don't look at it from a usefulness perspective, look at it from first off just a pure legal perspective. This is a requirement that was created under the provisions of the 1979 Immigration Act so it's just a legal requirement. Immigration has to do it strictly speaking so it's just required by law. The only way to get that to go away is to change the law. Next and something that again up until now, we didn't see a lot of usefulness about it because again it was a paper system and who's going to go through all that paper and figure all that out, if anything we are actually seeing the usefulness of it in this moment and we are seeing it, we just recently saw it. I have done videos on what is going down down in Phuket and down in Phuket they have been using the digital records of people to figure out the differential between how many entries and exits they have had and then they figured out the percentage differential and then gone through and figured out who didn't leave, so who may be on overstay and then they have gone in and using the TM30 system and using 90-day reporting of things figured out where people were living and then used that to go around and start finding some people or at least contacting landlords and figuring out if people were still on those premises and then going out and actually arresting them, apprehending them for overstay.

In fact, we recently got contacted by Thai Immigration directly because we were noted down, this was a Work Permit situation, and we had dealt with the Work Permit so they knew that we were on the case. They contacted us and said 'hey where is so and so?" This person, they haven't renewed their visa. We were sort of at first kind of worried, and we went back through our records and we said 'oh so and so passed away, they died'. That was very sad but yeah in the interim they had passed away. Thai Immigration didn't know this, they hadn't been notified; there is no reciprocity in notification over the Thai Immigration from either the Police or the US Embassy - in this case it was an American that was involved - the Embassy didn't notify Thai Immigration this person had died so they didn't know that they were dead. But they were using these tools, again 90-day reporting being one of them, to figure out if people were on overstay. And I think we are going to see this more and more where these tools, TM30, 90 day reporting are going to continue to be used in an effort to ascertain whether or not folks are here in Thailand lawfully and if they are not to go ahead and apprehend them, deport them and presumably place them on things like the Blacklist so they can't return to the Kingdom of Thailand.