Tips and tricks for preparing PR applications

The biggest headache dealing with your Thai Permanent Residency Application (ถิ่นที่อยู่ถาวร) isn’t actually dealing with the PR folks at immigration. It’s actually dealing with documents that mainly relate to you!

There are two categories which we focus on in this article:

• Company and employment related documents
• Educational and criminal records from your home country – and actually getting them authenticated and certified properly in accordance with Thai government processes

Both of these items are the biggest headaches in the PR process but this article offers some valuable tips and tricks that might save you from some unnecessary gray hairs!

Company and employment related documents

The criteria set out by immigration lists a range of documents needed for any PR application. (For simplicity, I am using the list of documents needed for people applying under the working/business category which can be downloaded from HERE).

Your own Finance and HR departments will have a substantive portion of the documents needed related to your employment and the company you work for in Thailand.

Accessing company documents

Our main advice for anyone applying for Thai Permanent Residency is to become best friends with your Human Resources department and have them on board for when you decide to apply. If you can get all of the required documents through them, then well and good.

However it isn’t unknown – actually quite common – for your HR department to drag its feet to the detriment of your Thai Permanent Residency application. So, it’s worthwhile knowing that if you want to ‘lighten their load’ so to speak, then you can organize to have most, but not all, of the documents collected yourself.

Thailand actually has a pretty good public database where statutory company documents are stored online and can be accessed by the general public. The organisation responsible for this is the Department of Business Development (กรมพัฒนาธุรกิจการค้า) or DBD.

The ‘easy to get’ documents

While the DBD has all documents online, the PR desk will need those documents certified by both the DBD and then the Revenue Department, so it’s worth actually going to a DBD office to get the printouts and certifications from them before heading over to the Revenue Department.

Some documents pertaining to your employer such as Company Registration, Balance Sheet/Profit and Loss Statement and List of Shareholders can be obtained by anyone who goes to the DBD, so there is no need to involve the employer with these if you don’t want to.

Other documents such as those outlined in Item 12 of the PR document checklist including the “Copy of the value added tax (VAT) or the specific business tax registration”: The Phor Phor 01, Phor Phor 09, and Phor Phor 20 (ภพ01,  ภพ09, ภพ20 respectively) are normally readily available to your company’s finance department, so it shouldn’t be an effort for them to pull those documents up and print them out for you.

Please note too that it is likely that the PR desk will want these documents signed by the company’s directors and stamped with the company seal.

The ‘difficult to get documents’

Major problems come from trying to access ภงด01 (Por Ngor Dor 01 – A copy of the list of withholding income tax of Thai employees 1) and ภงด50 (Phor Ngor Dor 50 – company income tax form) due to their confidentiality.

These documents can be highly guarded as they contain sensitive employee and company data. While the company will be very used to submitting them to the tax department, Finance and HR departments will often balk at sharing these with anyone else

A work around for the PND 01 and PND 50 forms…

If the company is uncomfortable with you having access to these documents, then we can suggest certain workarounds to preserve confidentiality for these two sensitive documents.

• An authorized person in the company could give you the documents in a sealed envelope for you to hand over the documents to the PR desk.
• If that doesn’t work, an alternative could be that someone external to the company (like your company’s auditors) is given the authorization by your directors to request these documents from the revenue department provided that they sign a non-disclosure agreement with your employer. This is likely going to happen at your own expense, but in some cases, it is the only way.

Please note that if you work for a particularly large firm, these can be costly – depending on the number of employees in your company as you need to pay for the document to the revenue department.

Authentication of documents from your home country

For your Thai permanent residency application, you’ll also be needing to provide the following:

• Educational certificates of your highest degree or educational attainment (including vocational training).
• Police clearances/Criminal background checks from the country of your current nationality that has been issued in the three months leading up to your PR application.

Before you can submit these documents, they’ll need to be fully legalised (sometimes called an ‘apostille’) by the nominated state or national authority (sometimes both), before being sent to the Thai embassy in the country where these were issued. The embassy will then ‘legalise’ these documents before they can be sent onto Thailand. Before they are submitted to the Thai PR team, these documents need to be translated to Thai and the further certified by the Thai MFA.

These steps are time consuming and but essential to ensure that your documents are recognized in Thailand. For the educational documents, it is well worth doing them well ahead of any potential PR application as for most countries they can take some weeks.

Unfortunately, it doesn’t make sense to outline these in detail here as every country follows a different procedure on how you authenticate a document. However the Thai embassy in each country should have online details on how this process works and under the ‘Consular Services’ page you see the country specific information under the ‘legalization’ tab.

Other Thai PR tips and tricks

This webpage as received many, many tips and tricks from readers who’ve gone through the process. Here are some things to look out for (in no particular order):

• Criminal Background Checks for US citizens: Please note that given that these FBI checks must be no older than 3 months on the date of submission of your PR application, time is really of the essence to get them done. In the US the FBI generated report needs to be done with both State and Federal Level authentications, before being sent to the Thai embassy. At present the US Department of State has about an 11-week average processing time in addition to the Thai embassy 3 weeks if all this is handled by mail. So for this step we recommend hiring external counsel in the US to handle these processes as much as possible physically so as to avoid unnecessary delay.
• For documents legalized out of the United Kingdom: We’ve had a lot of PR applicants tell us a company called ‘Apostille of The Hague’ to be well versed in dealing with the issue from a Thai perspective (please note we do not have a commercial relationship with them nor formally endorse them and we suggest all readers do their own research before engaging them).