Poll: Should Taiwan suspend Gold Card immigration?

But why would the landlord care about how you’re handling your deductions for taxes? I’m still not understanding why they’d bother.

(And no, I don’t know what’s so different about the concept of receipts between the us and Taiwan - what’s the difference?)

In some cases you may be eligible for some form of rent assistance. For that you would need a receipt, contract, and your landlord’s relevant information for processing. That means they would then be in the system for the rent you give them as income earned.

Yeah, I got that - sounds similar enough to section 8. But normal renting? And not getting rental receipts as evidence of tax evading culture? I still don’t understand how the dots connect.

I believe it’s because if you want to deduct your rent on your taxes, you need to have receipts proving how much you paid in rent. I’m actually not sure if this is true, but that seems to be what people believe. I recall from some previous threads that if you try to deduct your rent but your landlord hasn’t agreed to give you receipts, it can create drama and you might be pressured or forced to move.

If the landlord doesn’t give you receipts for your rental payments, he can comfortably not report his rental income because the tax office will never have any record that he was paid rent.

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How many gold cardholders are there now?

https://goldcard.nat.gov.tw/en/ says close to 2,000 now. Apparently the number of applicants has surged this year. It’s sort of being promoted by bloggers these days as a Covid refugee program for location-independent people (digital nomads).

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Right before the world was impacted by COVID, there were only 584 Gold Card holders after 2 years. It looks like the number has more than tripled in less than a year…It’s safe to surmise most are COVID refugees.

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It’s clear that the current numbers are super inflated and mostly Covid refugees. It will be interesting to see how many remain in Taiwan after the pandemic :slight_smile:

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The government actually does do some of this stuff. They’ve organized a couple of social events and workshops (there’s one this afternoon actually, on starting your own business) and recently established a separate gold card office that might assist with this kind of stuff.

The number of people who’ve received the card is still pretty low (1000-1500 in total within the last year, I believe), so it should be manageable. Some of those (including me) were already in Taiwan before applying and before coronavirus. I think another purpose of the scheme is legitimizing (=taxes) some of the remote working types who’d already been here for a while on visa exemptions etc.

Yeah, the economy category should perhaps be revised as it accounts for the majority of applicants and isn’t too hard to achieve abroad. I’d say that the technology category should also be modified (it’s currently too strict, in my opinion, including one of the subcategories being having a Nobel Prize, which is just ridiculous).

I’m also surprised by some of the dumb, vague questions I see on Facebook, Line, and here from gold card holders and applicants - I sometimes think that if they can’t figure this simple stuff out maybe they shouldn’t be eligible.

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??? :thinking: 5% is high? How about 18%, 21%, 25%?

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>Tens of thousands of Taiwanese coming back to seek refuge - A-OK.
>A dozen gold card holders coming in - Oh no bro, you got the coofs, stay back!

Who cares.

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They should take some tips from Canada’s investor citizenship program. You just need to loan the Federal government 1.2 million for 5 years interest free.

-You and your spouse must have legally obtained a personal net worth of a minimum of CAD 2 million.

-You must invest CAD 1.2 million for a period of five years at no interest (0%) under one of the two available immigrant investor programs. The investment is government-guaranteed and will be repaid in full at the end of the investment period.

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I’m hoping that getting more diversity amongst foreign professionals will lead to increased opportunities for different skillsets in the Taiwanese economy. Taiwan makes it easy to teach here but has strong antiforeign labor lobbies. I’d like to have dual citizenship based on me just being a good citizen and taxpayer. It’s almost like you have to be as good as Mother Teresa to be worthy of living here.
I have a small manufacturing consulting company here and it was incredibly difficult to meet the requirements a few years ago. Many people taught English for 5 years to get the APRC then opened their business, restaurant, etc.

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Nailed it. Taiwanese of convenience are a much bigger problem.

Or maybe not. The Harper government (not exactly known as anti-business liberal softies) did some analysis and found this scheme netted Canada almost nothing in taxes while also juicing the property market. To their credit they killed this fast-track-for-the-rich federal program. Some Canadian provinces unfortunately still have this scheme in place, leading to further inter-provincial headaches (example: immigrant claims to be settling in Quebec or Atlantic Canada, then immediately hightails it to Toronto or BC, because of course they will).

In short: I would not recommend this scheme to any government that actually cares about its people.

Guy

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Actually there supposedly is such a program which they’ve offered for some years (invest NT$30million in Taiwan Government bonds for 3 years to get an APRC).

But because of different rules from different parts of the government and the central bank, it turns out that the total investment has to be 3 times this (because of central bank limitations on how much in bonds a foreigner can own), and no bank or broker is prepared to let a foreigner open an investment account and help to deal with all the required approvals processes anyway.

So the result is that, apparently, not one person has successfully applied through this “investment” scheme :man_shrugging:

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Because the numbers of gold card people are close to insignificant compared to the overall traffic. And I’m presuming they want to see a negative covid test before entering

You can claim the rental deduction without a receipt from the landlord. I’ve done it before and my accountant was fine with just proof of payment from my side.

The tax office can figure out from your address whether or not the landlord is claiming income from the rental and that is when it may become problematic.

Mother Theresa was an evil old crone.

Curious did you ask how the English teacher was able to qualify?