The Revenue Department plans to launch a trial run of web scraping, a technique used for extracting data from websites, in order to prevent tax avoidance by pure-online vendors.
Web scraping will enable the tax-collecting agency to gather online sellers' preliminary information such as location and number of website visitors, said director-general Ekniti Nitithanprapas.
The measure will be a large-scale inspection, not case-by-case, and officials will use the preliminary data for further processing.
The Revenue Department currently uses staff to visit each online vendor's website to track information about numbers of visitors and sometimes pose as customers, but the process is time-consuming and cases of inspection are limited, Mr Ekniti said.
The adoption of web scraping is aimed at fostering tax parity between internet vendors and physical outlets.
To better tax online vendors, the National Legislative Assembly (NLA) recently approved an e-payment law as a tool for the Revenue Department to tax the income of non-salaried earners, particularly online vendors. The new law will go into force on Jan 1, 2020.
Under the law, each financial institution will be required to report transactions of customer accounts that receive either more than 3,000 money transfers a year or at least 400 money transfers with a total value of at least 2 million baht a year to the Revenue Department.
Mr Ekniti said the department is undergoing digital transformation with a focus on technology that offers convenience to taxpayers, from registration to the tax debt management process.
The country's largest tax collector plans to adopt the Request to Pay service for juristic entity taxpayers, he said, which will direct tax payments to the department.
Applying blockchain technology to the value-added tax (VAT) refund system is also under study, he said.
The Revenue Department's tax collection for the first two months of fiscal 2019 was greater than expected.
From October to November, the department gathered 274 billion baht, exceeding the target by 27 billion or 11.1% and up 34 billion baht or 14.1% from a year earlier.