Thai Revenue Department Allows Electronic Invoicing

The Thai Revenue Department has recently issued a departmental regulation which allows approved VAT registrants to raise and send tax electronic invoices and receipts to their customers for whole or partial sale of goods or provision of services. Therefore, there will be no requirement to print out and deliver those documents in hard copy.

Keywords: Thailand, Tax, Revenue Department, Electronic Invoicing, VAT

The process to be allowed to issue electronic invoices and receipts includes:

  • The VAT registrant submitting an application for approval by the Director-General of the Revenue Department.
  • The applicant meeting certain qualifying criteria:

  – Being a limited or public company having fully paid-up registered capital of Baht 10m or more or being a government agency;

  – Having a track record of carrying on business over a period of time; and

  – Having sound internal control systems.

Once approved by the Director-General of the Revenue Department, the applicant must follow the rules and conditions prescribed by this regulation for preparing and keeping electronic tax invoices and receipts. These rules concern the I.T. level controls such as security of data, maintaining an audit trail, user access levels and passwords.

Electronic tax invoices and receipts must contain two digital signatures created by means prescribed under this regulation, together with a certificate and the signatory’s certificate number issued by a certification authority approved by the Thai Revenue Department.

The data contained in the electronic tax invoices, credit and debit notes, and receipts (e.g. customer’s name and address, price of goods or services, and amount of value added tax) must be exported every month and provided to the Thai Revenue Department.

This is a significant step forward and part of the Revenue Department’s strategy to make tax in Thailand more efficient for companies. At this stage it is not clear how the above conditions will be monitored and assessed by the Revenue Department. This will be better understood over time as the Revenue Department encourages companies to adopt this scheme.

Source : http://www.rd.go.th/publish/31224.0.html