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| Congress passes cryptocurrency tax bill |
Congress passed the $1.2 trillion infrastructure package and submitted the bill to President Joe Biden for his signature. The bill includes a new crypto tax reporting requirement that the Treasury Department can apply to bitcoin miners.
The Biden Labor and Infrastructure Investment Act requires brokers to report information about traders trading more than $10,000 to the Internal Revenue Service.
The clause was included in the Senate version of the bill in late July after the Joint Tax Committee estimated that it would offset $28 billion in infrastructure costs over the next decade.
But the crypto community is more concerned with how the bill defines brokers than with the new tax requirements it imposes on them.
Industry groups and think tanks like the Digital Chamber of Commerce and the Currency Center believe the current wording of the bill is too broad and vague and could force these reporting requirements on minors and wallet developers, not just brokers like Coinbase.
Senators sympathetic to the cryptocurrency industry tried to address this issue before the bill was passed this summer by passing an amendment that clarified the role of brokers in the legislation.
But the change was rejected in August. Soon after the Senate passed the bill, the bipartisan blockchain community wrote to all lawmakers in the House of Representatives asking them to help reform crypto payments.
It is not clear when President Biden will sign
The lawmakers wrote in their August letter: It is important to announce taxes on cryptocurrencies. But it must be done correctly. When the Infrastructure Investment and Employment Bill was presented to the House of Representatives. We must prioritize a language review to explicitly exclude blockchain intermediaries and to ensure that civil liberties are protected.
Despite efforts to change the language of the House of Representatives, problems remain with the definition of mediator in the final law. Once Biden signs the law, the Treasury will have exclusive authority to decide which companies can act as intermediaries.
A Treasury official previously said it would not target bitcoin miners and hardware developers. But this promise will not prevent the new government from pursuing it in the future.
The cryptocurrency group is preparing to prevent the Treasury from changing its view on future miners. These groups are striving to reform the law to permanently restrict new languages.