maybe it has changed since I first got my retirement visa but when I applied what was required was a police report from either your current country of residence or from the country of your citizenship. A Thai police report wasn't required.
you don't need to be retired to get a "retirement" visa for Thailand, you just need to be 50 years old, meet the financial requirements, and not be working in Thailand.
if you have an OA visa and have been extending your stay annual for years, when you get a new passport of the same nationality must you have the visa transferred into your new passport or can you just carry your old and new passport until your next annual extension?
The problem with wiring money into the US might have been that US banks offer poor exchange rates. When wiring money from the US it’s important to specify that the wire be denominated in US Dollars, that way the conversion to Baht will be done by the receiving bank.
ATM machines use Visa's exchange rate and that's very close to the interbank rate. So if that 220 Baht fee gets refunded that's the best that you're going to do. Credit card purchases get an equally good rate if your credit card issuer doesn't charge a foreign transaction fee.