Tax authorities around the world have indicated that they will not sit back and watch crypto traders get rich as prices skyrocket – with new tax measures set to come into play in Europe, Asia and beyond. (Updated at 13:45 UTC: correction made to information about G7 summit in third paragraph.)
The G7, which comprises Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, the UK, and the United States, could be set to streamline its crypto taxation policy – after the Japanese Finance Minister Taro Aso was quoted by Reuters as stating that the “implementation of digital taxation and central bank digital currency” would be on the agenda when world leaders meet in Britain later this week.
The February 12 G7 summit will be held online and chaired by the UK, ahead of the first in-person meeting of major leaders on a major scale since the start of the coronavirus pandemic, slated for June this year. Yet although pressing matters like post-COVID economic recovery plans are likely to dominate the agenda, Aso appears keen to ensure a chunk of time is spent on working out how tax bodies can target the incomes of crypto traders.
Japan has sought to use its own leadership of global groups to steer other nations toward a uniform approach to regulations in the past. Pre-COVID-19, Tokyo, as the then-leader of the G20, handed out booklets to high-level attendees, attempting to sway world leaders in the direction of crypto exchange policing.
Tokyo got its wish, in some form at least, in the shape of the Financial Task Force’s Travel Rule – being rolled out in jurisdictions across the world.
And crypto tax is shaping up to become just as universal. Outside the G7 nations, Spanish authorities are also getting increasingly eager when it comes to crypto tax. The country already has crypto tax laws in place, like many other European nations.
But per El Español, the Spanish tax agency (known as the Hacienda) is mulling a plan to hit crypto traders who fail to declare their earnings with fines of around USD 6,000. The penalties would also be dished out to crypto traders providing tax bodies with faulty or incorrect information on their annual tax returns.
The Hacienda also wants to apply a controversial ruling on overseas asset declarations to crypto earnings, in plans unveiled earlier this month.
Elsewhere, in Russia, similar crypto declaration systems are also in the pipelines – and could roll out in the coming financial year (FY2021).
And in South Korea, the cabinet is set to sign off on a series of bundled tax legal amendments today, with crypto tax set to start as planned in 2022, reported News1.
Crypto tax had been set to roll out in South Korea in October this year, but traders were given a three-month reprieve after exchanges complained that they would not be ready to roll out transaction-reporting systems in time to meet the deadline.
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