YouThere are some legends in the crypto system. One of them is that these are completely anonymous and therefore not traceable. This goes along with the assumption that the discovery of tax liability is not far off. “In the past, tax officials had some technical gripes. This is why requests to pay taxes in the crypto sector were not followed like elsewhere,” says BlockPit CEO Florian Wimmer. The Austrian company specializes in software for creating tax and money laundering documents for blockchain applications and has private and institutional clients in six countries.
But anyone who thinks that the tax authorities are still far behind is likely to be wrong. For the third quarter, European Union Commission As part of the Action Plan for Fair and Equitable Taxation, the expansion of automatic exchange of information for crypto investments and e-money has been announced. It could be implemented as early as 2023 under DAC8 (Eighth ed. of “Directive on Administrative Cooperation”).
It’s also about the past
That’s almost billions in taxes. According to an extrapolation from BlockPit, the Frankfurt School Blockchain Center and law firm Dr. Andres at least 1.28 billion euros in the 2020 tax year. With DAC8, the obligation to provide information applies to all Me Active financial service providers expanded. The exchange should be down to the level of the transaction. “The latest developments will be taken into account when making deposits and withdrawals,” says Wimmer.
Tax tracking has become stricter internationally. The United States requested tax-related information from crypto exchanges for the first time in 2018, and Europe will follow suit. Expanding the registration requirements for financial services providers was the first step, says Wimmer. Investors in Germany, in particular, should be wary. The Federal Ministry of Finance is currently preparing a detailed guideline for the taxation of income from stake and mining, i.e. from production of coins and confirmation of transactions.
don’t be too naive
In other respects as well, crypto investors should not be too naive, Wimmer warned. Because with a limitation period of up to ten years, earlier transactions are still taxable. In theory, income from crypto trading in Germany and Austria is counted as profit from private sales transactions. These are taxable if less than a year has passed between the purchase and the sale.
The FIFO (“first-in-first-out”) method applies: if the values are the same, it is assumed that the first received were the first to be sold as well. It cannot be ruled out that the speculative period of crypto investments used to place bets will be increased to ten years, as these values generate current income. “The EU directive would actually make wallets anonymous,” Wimmer says. “The next level of tax prosecution would be that crypto trading would be fully traceable when entered through any regulated exchange due to the mandatory identification of financial service providers.”
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