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[On November 29], Coinbase suffered a major defeat at the hands of the Internal Revenue Service, nearly a year after the case was initially filed. A California federal court has ordered Coinbase to turn over identifying records for all users who have bought, sold, sent, or received more than $20,000 through their accounts in a single year between 2013 and 2015. Coinbase estimates that 14,355 users meet the government's requirements.
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Coinbase Ordered to Report 14,355 Users to the IRS
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The world is full of people who have never, since childhood, met an
open doorway with an open mind.
-- E. B. White
(Score: 5, Interesting) by bradley13 on Tuesday December 05 2017, @01:18PM (1 child)
"Maybe if society were organized more transparently, we wouldn't have to fund a massive bureaucracy to go around beating money out of people."
This. The sheer amount of useless effort caused by income taxes should make it clear: this is the wrong way for a government to collect money. You have the whole tax-collection apparatus. You have the tax accountants who prepare the documents. You have the hours wasted by the individuals, reporting by employers and banks and on and on... If collecting taxes causes this much wasted effort, maybe it's the fault of the tax system.
What would happen if you replaced the whole mess with something - almost anything - else? A national sales tax (VAT, for us Europeans), for example? Of course, if VAT is too high, you will also get compliance problems. Thinking of Germany - when I worked there, more than half of my paycheck disappeared to taxes *and* they have close to 20% VAT. When "tax day" is sometime in August...maybe government spending is too high?
Here, in Switzerland, we don't have any sort of withholding. You file your tax return, you get a bill for the government. If you earn, say, $100,000, you might get a bill for $20,000 or so. Some people want to introduce withholding, because these bills are so shocking, and lots of people fail to plan for them. But you know: I think it's great! Having your tax bill hit like a bomb makes you realize how much money the government takes from each and every person. This, in turn, encourages people to vote against unnecessary government spending.
If taxes were lower, they wouldn't be worth avoiding. You wouldn't need the accountants and tax consultants and the whole tax bureaucracy. The root of the problem is excessive government spending.
Everyone is somebody else's weirdo.
(Score: 2) by urza9814 on Wednesday December 06 2017, @04:02PM
One man's wasted effort is another man's paycheck. And profit margins. And a lobbying fund to keep it that way...