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IRS devising more sophisticated ways to keep track of people evading tax on cryptocurrency earnings

source-logo  ambcrypto.com 09 July 2019 20:30, UTC

The United States’ Internal Revenue Service is in the news again after a new method of its to keep a tab on those who evade tax on their cryptocurrency earnings came to the fore.

According to a 181 slide presentation, James Daniels, IRS-CI’s cyber-crime program manager, laid out a plan of extracting information from taxpayers, to check whether they have a history of downloading cryptocurrency applications. The aim of this presentation is to identify if a person has made any form of transactions or holds cryptocurrencies.

The presentation also elaborates on the ways to obtain Grand Jury subpoenas for collecting bank, credit card and PayPal records. The collected data is then later analyzed to identify activities involving the receipt or transfer of cryptocurrencies.

The other way by which the IRS can identify linked address is by making use of block explorers to extract details about the time and the amount of cryptocurrencies involved in the transaction. A slide from the aforementioned presentation said,

“Once a Bitcoin Address is identified, it can be looked upon a Bitcoin Blockchain Explorer to find information such as value, transaction times, transaction locations, which may help in corroborating information, identifying additional addresses and locating the subject.”

Rising number of taxpayers evading filing taxes on gains made from cryptocurrency trading is cited as a major reason why such stringent actions are being implemented. According to the data put out by the IRS during the 2015 tax year, only 802 people had filed their earning through digital assets, regardless of profits or losses.

Previously Coinbase, one of the largest crypto exchanges in the world, received a summons from the IRS to give them the details of transactions that happened between 2013 to 2015. Coinbase had to give details of people whose crypto transactions exceeded $20,000.

ambcrypto.com