The US Senate passed a $1 trillion infrastructure bill that includes vague new tax reporting requirements that digital rights activists say threaten individual privacy and crypto advocates say could hamstring industry innovation in the US.
The bill’s authors focused on closing the crypto “tax gap” to pay for some of the massive spending plan, but critics say it falls short of appropriately regulating the budding industry. The bill requires any crypto “broker,” defined as anyone “responsible for and regularly providing any service effectuating transfers of digital assets on behalf of another person,” to report users’ names and addresses.
That leaves all sorts of players in the crypto space including miners and software developers on the hook — even though many of them do not currently gather or access personal information about users, many of whom are anonymous.
The language of the bill could be altered when it gets to the House of Representatives. The entire infrastructure bill faces a formidable fight in the House where progressives have vowed to “tank” the deal unless an even more expansive version is passed. The potentially drawn-out nature of the fight ahead should give crypto advocates time to make the case for more fitting tax requirements.