I Paid A Man 300 Dollars To Tell Me It Depends

It was a small shop across the road from an immigration office up north. There was a photocopier, a desk, a price list inside plastic taped to the glass, and a little fan pointed straight at the face of the woman who ran it. Her grandson was doing homework on the floor behind her. He was colouring in more than he was writing.

I paid her to fill in a form I could have filled in myself. I was tired, and the queue across the road was already out the door.

She took my passport and went through the stamps with the back of a pen. Then she stopped, counted again on her fingers, and turned the page round so I could see it.

I had 1 day less than I thought. I had the date in a note on my phone, and the note was wrong, because I had not counted the day I arrived. In Thailand the day you arrive counts as day 1.

She did not explain any of that. She wrote the real date on the back of my photocopy and drew a circle round it. Then she took my photo for the form, and then she took another one. I still do not know what the second photo was for.

This was the year Thailand changed its tax rule on money that people living there bring in from abroad. Every expat group I was in lost its mind at the same time. People posted screenshots of screenshots. A man said his cousin worked at the tax office, and a lot of people believed him. I read all of it, mostly at 2 in the morning.

I found a man in Bangkok who does tax for foreigners. I had 11 questions typed in a note on my phone.

He had a real bookshelf behind him, or a very good picture of one. He answered my first 2 questions clearly, in about 5 minutes, and I felt my shoulders come down.

The third question was the one I actually cared about. I had some savings in an account back home, money I had earned years before. If I brought it over now, did it count?

It depended on how many days I had been in the country that year. It depended on an agreement between Thailand and the country I still pay tax in, which I had never read. Mostly it depended on how the tax office was going to read its own new rule. He said, very calmly, that he did not think the tax office knew that yet either.

We used the rest of the hour. He was careful and polite and he did not guess once. When we hung up I sat on the edge of the bed for a while and felt like I had been robbed by a professional.

For a long time after that I told it as a joke at dinner. 300 dollars for a shrug. It got a laugh every time, so I kept telling it.

3 invitations arrived in my inbox that week. I went to one. A man in a blue polo shirt talked for 50 minutes about how serious this all was, and he was sure about everything. Every question in the chat got a fast, confident answer. He said the word "risk" so many times that I stopped hearing it as a word.

The last 10 minutes were a package. It was a full review of your situation for 1,800 dollars, and the price was going up on Friday.

I did not buy it. I closed the laptop and did not sleep properly for most of a week, and that week is why I paid the man in Bangkok. I think I was trying to buy the feeling of being sure. Nobody honest had that for sale.

About 6 weeks after my call, the tax office put out a second notice. It answered my third question, the exact one. Money earned before the new rule started was left out of it.

So it had depended, on a piece of paper that did not exist yet on the day I asked.

I did not see it that way at the time. I read the notice in a café and mostly felt stupid. I had paid 300 dollars for an answer I could have waited 6 weeks for, for free. It took me much longer to notice that he was the only person that whole month who had told me he did not know.

I think about the woman with the fan and the man with the bookshelf together now.

Both of them were honest with me. The difference was my question. Hers had an answer, and it was sitting in my passport in blue ink. The one I asked him did not have an answer anywhere yet, because the thing I was asking about had not happened.

There is a business out here now for every rule people are scared of. It is visa agents and tax people and relocation companies, and the man with the cousin. Plenty of them are good at it. From the outside, when you are scared, the good ones and the others look exactly the same.

So before I pay anybody, I ask myself whether my question has an answer today. If it does, I pay a professional properly and I do not argue about the price. If it does not, an honest person is going to tell me it depends, and I should listen. The one who is very sure usually has something to sell you at the end of the hour.

He sent me a summary afterwards. It was 2 pages, as a PDF, and it is still in my email somewhere.

The last line says to look at all of this again when the tax office explains more. I never booked the second call. Those questions go to my accountant back home now. He is slower and cheaper, and he says it depends about as often.

I have not mentioned this here before. I have written 3 short books. The first one is called The Border, and it is about the visa run, in the years when I kept the count of my days in my own head and got it wrong. The first chapter is free on its own page. No email, no form. If it does not land, keep your money.

Andrew - No Refunds •••