Guidelines on the Collection System of Tobacco Tax for the Local Maintenance of Bangkok

Abstract

Bangkok Metropolitan Administration (BMA) began to have the concept of collecting tobacco tax for local maintenance, similar to Provincial Government Administration, since 2012. At present, in 2022, BMA has not implemented tobacco tax collection at all. BMA should start local tobacco tax collection as soon as possible, by issuing a local ordinance, or an amendment of the Bangkok Administrative Regulations Act, should be enacted in accordance with the Act of Determining Plans and Procedures for Decentralization of Powers to Local Administrative Organizations, B.E. 2542. The rate per one cigarette is supposed to be not over 10-cent per cigarette stick. Currently the tax collection exercised by the Provincial Administrative Organization is up to 9.30-cent per cigarette, or 1.86 bath per pack of cigarettes. By not collecting tobacco tax for the Bangkok Metropolitan area, may cause tax evasion problems for trans-national tobacco industry, which transports imported cigarettes into the Bangkok area. For the purpose of data collection on taxes collected by the Excise Department, it is advisable to separate the data on licences for domestically produced cigarettes, and imported cigarettes, with the collection of data on the number of cigarette sticks. By this method, the license numbers would be useful for the estimation, or useful for any other necessary studies.