Monday, July 01, 2024

US Treasury finalizes crypto rules to prevent tax evasion

 At a meeting of PwC partners last week, CEO Kevin Burrowes revealed he's actually getting paid a portion of his substantial $4 million salary from the international network who want him to contain the scandal fallout.

~ Mark Di Stefano


PwC’s agent Kevin Burrowes revealed as a $4m man

The revelation PwC Australia’s CEO is also paid by PwC International adds further texture to the firm’s intransigence with the Senate.

Myriam Robin and Mark Di Stefano

When PwC International drafted in Kevin Burrowes to quarantine its Antipodean crisis to these shores, it didn’t expect him to work for free. Kevin’s life was sweet in Singapore. Warmer weather, chicken rice lunch at his hawker local. Why give that all up for this excruciating assignment?

We should have known the global operation was also paying him the whole time. Though this fact has been carefully kept from notice, until last week’s partners meeting, when it came up in the context of how the firm would answer even more parliamentary questions.



The Australian Tax Office Implements New Measures to Weed Crypto Tax Evaders


US Treasury finalizes crypto rules to prevent tax evasion

Crypto platforms will have to start reporting traders' sales proceeds to the IRS.

While people who own and sell cryptocurrency have always had to pay taxes on their earnings, a new rule finalizedby the US Treasury Department can ensure that they're paying the proper amount on their sales. 

The new rule will require cryptocurrency platforms like exchanges and payment processors to report their users' transactions to the Internal Revenue Service. According to The Wall Street Journal, authorities are hoping that the measure can deter tax evasion, seeing as the IRS would know exactly how much a taxpayer owes.

At the same time, the rule will make it much easier for people for declare their earnings because their brokers will now have to provide them with a 1099 form. 

The IRS released a draft form of 1099-DA(Digital Asset Proceeds From Broker Transaction) made especially to track crypto transactions last year and will make the final version available soon. To note, the rule sets a threshold of $10,000 to report on transactions involving stablecoin, which are cryptocurrencies that track fiat money like the US dollar.

"[I]nvestors in digital assets and the IRS will have better access to the documentation they need to easily file and review tax returns,” Aviva Aron-Dine, the Treasury’s acting assistant secretary for tax policy, said in a statement. “By implementing the law’s reporting requirements, these final regulations will help taxpayers more easily pay taxes owed under current law, while reducing tax evasion by wealthy investors.”

The new rule will only apply to platforms that take possession of digital assets, such as Coinbase or Binance. It doesn't cover decentralized ones, which will have to comply with a separate rule that's expected to be finalized later this year. Brokers will have to start reporting sales proceeds on digital assets in 2026 for all transactions accomplished in 2025, which means crypto traders are still on their own for 2024.


Samizdata quote of the day – Eastern Europe is showing Britain up on Free Speech

Scruton gave a lecture on Wittgenstein to a private circle of intellectuals. He was quick to notice, however, that “they were far more interested in the fact that I was visiting at all”, rather than deliberations on the rather impenetrable Austrian thinker. The sense of togetherness was, according to the recollection of a Czech dissident, “the most important morale booster for us”.

It wasn’t just intellectuals who were in peril. The country, Scruton discovered, contained a sophisticated network of secret agents and snitches. Denunciation was prolific and social scrutiny omnipresent. No one, including the most inconsequential citizens, could feel safe from the Big Brother of the state and social pressure of their peers. The Czech author and playwright Václav Havel made this atmosphere famous when describing the deliberations of a greengrocer, who had to place a pro-regime slogan on display in his shop to avoid being denounced or judged unfavourably by his neighbours.

It is 2024, and in many ways the positions of Britain and Czechoslovakia (now Czechia) have reversed. It is now in Prague where freedom of speech and thought is tolerated, and it is in Britain where it is under assault – sometimes on the social level, but increasingly on the legal level as the recent legislation in Scotland shows. True, people seldom go to prison for expressing their opinions – like Havel did in Czechoslovakia – but lives have been destroyed nonetheless. Sackings, cancellations and character assassinations have proliferated in the country that was once hailed as the cradle of liberalism.

– Štěpán Hobza