United States-based cryptocurrency exchange Kraken said it will share the data of 42,000 users with the US Internal Revenue Service (IRS) in compliance with a court order. The information will be sent to the IRS in early November.
On their support page, Kraken specify that the subpoena to produce “a wide range of records and data” about its American clients and pass them to the IRS came in a court order from the US District Court for the Northern District of California in May 2021. The company He opposed the IRS’s lawsuits and fought the subpoena in court, convincing it to “substantially reduce” the number of affected customers and the amount of customer data.
The court ordered Kraken to submit the profile and transaction data of customers who exceeded $20,000 in transactions during any year between 2016 and 2020. That also includes those who did not make transactions but made deposits and withdrawals.
Related: IRS Proposes Unprecedented Data Collection on Cryptocurrency Users
Kraken will share data such as names, dates of birth, tax ID, addresses, contact information and transaction history of affected customers. There will reportedly be around 42,000 accounts whose information will be sent to the IRS.
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the First Circuit is reviewing another case in which the IRS demanded user data from Coinbase. In 2018, the exchange told its 13,000 affected clients that it would provide the IRS with their taxpayer IDs, names, dates of birth, addresses and historical transaction records from 2013 to 2015.
One of those users, James Harper, appealed against the IRS to prevent the US government from having unlimited access to a user’s transaction history. In October 2023, cryptocurrency advocacy group DeFi Education Fund filed an amicus brief supporting Harper’s appeal.
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