Menu
Tax Notes logo

Virtual Currency, FBAR, and the Ripple Effect

Posted on July 2, 2019

We welcome back guest blogger James Creech. In this post James explains some of the current uncertainties surrounding virtual currency, particularly in how future IRS guidance might interact with legal positions taken by other federal agencies. Christine

Recently FinCen informed the AICPA Virtual Currency Task Force that Bitcoin and other Virtual Currencies do not trigger FBAR reporting even when held in an offshore wallet.

This guidance comes as a bit of a surprise for some tax practitioners. Conventional wisdom had been that there was a difference between Virtual Currencies being held in cold storage on a thumb drive in a foreign county, and those being held by a foreign third party who also retained the private keys to the Virtual Currency as a part of their service. It was believed that if the private keys were stored by the wallet service, and the wallet service could convert the Virtual Currency to fiat currency, then the account could be considered similar to an online poker account and reportable under U.S. v Hom, No. 14-16214, 9th Cir., (7/26/16).

While this will be welcome news for many taxpayers who hold foreign wallets, this guidance by FinCen has the potential to be more impactful on the tax consequences of Virtual Currencies than would initially be apparent. The IRS has long relied on other agencies to define key terms, and to more fully develop the legal nature of Virtual Currencies. This FinCen guidance may be the beginning of a deepening rift between agencies.

It is expected that the IRS will be releasing new Virtual Currency guidance shortly that will address some of the technological developments in the industry. One of the areas that could be addressed by this guidance is whether Virtual Currency held in foreign wallets is reportable on Form 8938. If the IRS decides that the Hom rational is correct and that foreign wallets are reportable this will create another significant distinction between the FBAR and Form 8938. For taxpayers this creates a higher likelihood of unfilled Form 8938’s due to taxpayer error and greater confusion between FBAR and Form 8938 requirements. I expect that this increased error rate will be higher than normal due to the fact that the Virtual Currency community relies heavily on industry blogs that many times are more interested in promoting virtual currency purchases rather than informing readers about compliance requirements.

For tax practitioners this split also raises questions of how much weight to put on the guidance of other administrative agencies. Because the IRS has issued so little guidance on Virtual Currency there are very few absolutes. We know that Virtual Currency is property because Notice 2014-21 clearly says so. What we don’t know is how far that definition goes, or if it can be treated like other specialized types of property. In the non-IRS context, the SEC has defined certain types of Virtual Currency as securities, and the CFTC has said that it is a commodity. It logically follows that if the IRS says a certain Virtual Currency is property, and the SEC says this Virtual Currency is a security, that a dealer in that particular Virtual Currency should be able to use a mark to market election under IRC 475. Given that Virtual Currencies as a whole suffered a bear market in 2018, a mark to market treatment might provide a desirable tax loss for many in the industry.

If there is a split in the FBAR and Form 8938 definitions, then assumptions that the IRS will allow taxpayers to import definitions from other agencies in order to tackle unaddressed issues lose some of their logic. It is impossible to overstate how important prior FinCen definitions are for IRS Virtual Currency guidance. The root definition of what is a Virtual Currency for IRS purposes is based in a 2013 FinCen definition of “convertible virtual currencies”. If the IRS does not see eye to eye with FinCen then there is a diminished likelihood that the IRS would adopt a CFTC definition and allow Virtual Currencies the same type of preferential tax treatments that they would allow for an established commodity. Of course the opposite reaction might also be true. If the IRS is the first agency to state that foreign wallets are reportable, we might see FinCen respond by adjusting their guidance to require FBAR disclosure as well. Either way, the pending IRS guidance will tell us a lot about how the IRS is thinking about Virtual Currencies and how it intends to incorporate guidance from other administrative agencies.

DOCUMENT ATTRIBUTES
Subject Areas / Tax Topics
Authors
Copy RID