A recently published U.S. Internal Revenue Service (IRS) slide describes alarming recommendations on how tax agents should deal with digital currency users who are not paying taxes. The slide recommends that agents question crypto users’ friends and family, comb through social media posts and issue subpoenas to make sure U.S. residents are paying taxes on their cryptocurrencies.
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IRS Proposes Extreme Tactics for Investigating Crypto Users
An IRS slideshow created by James Daniels, IRS-CI cyber crimes program manager, describes some concerning methods IRS agents should use to crack down on crypto-using tax evaders. The slide follows the IRS’ recently announcing tax guidelines on cryptocurrencies, which will contain rules about the tax treatment of digital assets and forks. Even though the new tax guidelines haven’t been issued to the public, IRS agents who enforce the tax laws have have had no problems prosecuting bitcoin users for tax evasion. Agent Daniels’ recently published slide gives a lot of detail on how agents should combat crypto tax evaders by using a variety of investigation methods. Within the 181-page document, there are thorough descriptions of what a cryptocurrency is and chronicled paragraphs on assets like ripple (XRP) and bitcoin cash (BCH). The report discusses a myriad of digital currencies including BTC, XMR, BCH, XLM, XRP, and LTC. Daniels’ descriptive study even calls certain hardware wallet users “fanboys.”
Toward the end of the report, the slideshow explains how agents can track a bitcoin address using a public block explorer. “Once a Bitcoin Address is identified, it can be looked up
