End 90-day reporting
Swift action against foreigners for overstaying their visas, many for 10 years, shows that the 90-day address reporting system is completely useless. So why bother keeping such an inefficient tracking system around if the Immigration Bureau is unable to find illegals after such a long time? It’s a waste of time for both legal residents and also the immigration officers assigned to collect and endorse these declarations, while the illegals produce fake addresses or skip the process entirely.
It is time to modify or repeal this regulation, especially with the advance of internet technology that renders the whole current process at best antiquated and at worst completely useless. The so-called online reporting system that was implemented a while ago has been working on-and-off since it was launched and no one can expect its current implementation to be reliable enough to replace a forced visit to the immigration office. Not too many countries maintain similar requirements for their foreign residents, but Thailand does.
This regulation is completely ridiculous for foreigners with a yellow tabian baan book like myself (in my case for more than 25 years). If we move, we need to visit both our original district office and the one at our new location to re-register the yellow book showing the correct address; this document proves once and for all where we live. Is it not really stupid to have to tell the Immigration Bureau every three months that we are still living on our own property (I am legally the owner of the house while my wife is the owner of the land)?
Adding insult to injury we are forced to visit our own provincial immigration office every time as it is impossible to do so while traveling in the country in another province. This requirement is completely unreasonable.
Also unreasonable is the wide variety of rules regarding what is the documentation required to accompany the report (lease agreement, tabian baan, house registration, passport copies, current copies of visa and entry card, etc) which seems to depend more on the mood of the officer in charge than on standardised regulations.
Either the government demonstrates that this 90-day reporting system is really useful, something that has never happened in all these years, or it repeals the entire process once and for all. MICHEL BARRE Nonthaburi