BANGKOK: Thailand on Tuesday approved a draft bill requiring foreign digital service providers to pay a value-added tax , becoming the latest country in Southeast Asia to seek to boost tax revenues from international tech companies.
Last month, Indonesia passed a law requiring big internet companies to pay VAT on sales of digital products and services from July, and in the Philippines a lawmaker introduced a similar bill in parliament to tax digital services.The Thai bill, which still has to be voted on by Thailand's parliament, requires non-resident companies or platforms that earn more than 1.
Thailand is expected to add about 3 billion baht to its coffers annually from the move, which will affect services such as music and video streaming, gaming, and hotel booking, she added, without naming any companies.Thailand, Southeast Asia's second-largest economy, has mulled taxing digital businesses for years, hoping to tap the country's internet economy, one of the fastest growing in the region.
Nearly 140 countries from the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development are negotiating the first major rewriting of tax rules to take better account of the rise of big tech companies such as Amazon, Facebook, Apple and Google. Southeast Asian regulators held talks last year on a region-wide effort to tax tech giants more, while industry groups have warned that over-regulation could blunt the region's booming digital economy.