The IRS recently announced that it is not planning to establish a formal voluntary disclosure program for taxpayers who have unreported income derived from virtual currencies. Specifically, Daniel N. Price of the IRS’s Office of Chief Counsel stated on November 8, 2018 that he needed to dispel the rumor that had been circulating since last year that the IRS intended to establish a separate voluntary disclosure program for unreported income related to offshore virtual currencies. This is in contrast to the voluntary program that the IRS established for unreported income from offshore financial accounts.
Under IRS guidance from 2014, the IRS classified Bitcoin and other virtual currencies as property (rather than foreign currency). Accordingly, any income from virtual currency transactions is treated as either ordinary income or capital gains, whichever is applicable based on the activity that gave rise to the income (e.g. investment or mining). Because the IRS requires a U.S. taxpayer to report its worldwide income regardless of where that income was generated or where the taxpayer lives, a U.S. taxpayer could have significant income tax liability for its cryptocurrency activities that were conducted and remain offshore. In spite of this substantial U.S. taxpayer exposure, and despite the potentially enormous amount of unreported income from virtual currency activities, the IRS has provided relatively little guidance to taxpayers and tax professionals, given the complexity of the tax issues and reporting requirements triggered by virtual currencies. At the same time, as discussed previously in On the Chain, the IRS is preparing to collect the massive amount of tax from unreported income from Bitcoin-related trades.