Minefields

There are plenty of potential issues or pitfalls to do with company registration in Thailand.  Whilst I am not a business owner I do have experience of working for foreign based companies in Thailand who have fallen foul or failed to follow the complete rules involved with company registration in Thailand so please allow me to tell you my story.  The company was a small marketing firm that I had not even heard of and so that did not really bode well to start with, the entire outfit was running out of an office on one of the main streets of Bangkok.  Essentially everything was good and I enjoyed the job and made lots of friends but I knew a few things were amiss based on the fact that I had been employed, with a work permit no less, without having any formal university education.  The longest I had studied was fresh out of high school and that was enough of a struggle for me. Please click here For our full information & services fees for company registration in Thailand Due to slim job picking in my home country I took a plane to Thailand and got the first job I saw which happened to be the one I am mentioning.  I had no idea about the company registration process in Thailand but after I met the owners and talked to them about it I realised it was quite a lengthy process.  They told me everything that they needed to follow and all the protocol that has to be regulated and proceeded but whenever I asked about the work permit situation and why there was no real Thai staff to speak of they seemed to clam shut and I found this to be quite disconcerting.  Nonetheless I was lucky to have a job and I decided to look in to the company registration process some more in my spare time as I had always wanted to be a lawyer and I felt that the information I learned may be useful later on in the future. It turns out that company registration in Thailand is a convoluted process at best.  You need four Thai staff to every foreign member working and that alarmed me to start with and I also realised that there was no tax being deducted from my salary either.  These are just two of the important rules that need to be followed to ensure that the foreign company meets the requirements to be able to operate and trade in Thailand.  When I pressed these matters I was simply told that the process was underway with a lawyer and that I was not to worry.  Suffice to say that several months went by and I forgot about this and the entire company registration process in Thailand due to real life getting in the way so you can imagine that I was not happy to hear that I was being told I had to pay all the tax back that my employer had failed to pay the government each month from my salary.  Suffice to say I was not happy in the slightest and decided to look in to this some more but that will be discussed in the next article.