A co-worker of mine is going overseas for a TV shoot and needs to bring a large amount of money with him. We know that amounts over US$10,000 have to be declared at customs, but what happens after that? Is there any tax or duty that needs to be paid? Does it matter if the money is cash, traveller’s checks or bank check? The business is legit, so there are no worries about secrecy or anything like that.
Knowing the US policy on this would be fine, but if anyone also knows Thailand’s rules (they also have the US$10,000 declaration requirement), that would be great.
Is he going from Japan to Thailand, and then on to the U.S.? Or do you mean the rules for going from Japan directly to the U.S. with large wads of money?
Just going from Japan to Thailand (but carrying American dollars). The bit about America was just for possible future reference.
To do that, we’d need to have an account in Thailand. The real complicating factor is that the producer we’re hiring wants to be paid in dollars rather than baht. If baht were fine, we’d just wire the money to him directly. What we initially wanted to do was put the money in a US$ account at Citibank Japan and then withdraw it in Thailand, but we were told that the international branches don’t work together like that, so we’d need a separate account with Citibank Thailand. Right now we’re weighing options between dollar traveler’s checks and a dollar-based bank check.
(I notice that this thread is just kind of sitting on the front page, sliding further and further down, when you oughta be getting some responses, and on a business-day morning, too. I’d guess that your thread title looks like it might be about “illegal stuff”, and the serious GQ punters who would know the answer to your question are giving it a miss as they scroll down the forum because they’re not interested in talking to a clueless dweeb who only wants to drool online about “how to smuggle money through customs, heh heh…” before the thread gets locked. I’d suggest you e-mail a mod and ask him to put “Mod Approved, Okay To Talk About This” or something like that in your thread title.)