IRS Forces Coinbase To Hand Over 13,000 Customers Just In Time For Tax Season

Coinbase has been forced by court order to hand over thousands of its  customers’ names and personal information to the U.S. Internal Revenue  Service (IRS) in an effort for the agency to collect taxes from its  users.

“Received notice from Coinbase today,” Tweeted Andreas  Antonopoulos, “that my account is one of the 13,000 that they will have  to turn over to the IRS under the court order. Not surprised, I knew I  would be in that group. In case you were wondering, I’ve filed and paid  taxes for my Bitcoin income, gains/losses.” 

Coinbase users should check their email spam folders it could be the  difference in a potential IRS audit or worse. Last Friday, the San  Francisco-based cryptocurrency exchange notified thousands  of their customers, some 13,000, in compliance with a court order to  provide the IRS with “taxpayer ID, name, birth date, address, and  historical transaction records for certain higher-transacting customers  during the 2013-2015 period.” 

The announcement comes after a fight with the IRS by Coinbase mounted in  response to a late 2016 summons from the United States tax arm,  “demanding that Coinbase produce a wide range of records relating to  approximately 500,000 Coinbase customers. Coinbase fought this summons  in court in an effort to protect its customers, and the industry as a  whole, from unwarranted intrusions from the government.”

“After a long process, the court issued an order that represents a  partial, but still a significant, victory for Coinbase and its  customers: the order requires Coinbase to produce only certain limited  categories of information from the accounts of approximately 13,000  customers.” 

If you want to stay tax compliant in the U.S. you can purchase a Cointracking.info account (here) and find a CPA (here) at Happy Tax.

Recently, Coinbase, Visa, and Worldpay were forced to clarify an  issue why duplicate transactions appeared on customer accounts, the  fault was absolved by Visa and World Pay stating the error wasn’t  Coinbases. 

The same week that Coinbase had problems with double transactions the company opened up a new service self-titled Coinbase Commerce which will allow merchants to accept cryptocurrency payments already partnering with large merchant Shopify. 

Bitcoin is trading at [FIAT: $10,644.80 ] according to Coin Market Cap the markets seem to have recovered at the time of this report. 

Want an edge in the crypto markets? Subscribe to our free newsletter. Follow Coinivore on Facebook, at Twitter and Steemit.