Smart Investing – EarthyRealist.com

Reporting your cryptocurrency trades to the Internal Revenue Service will no longer be based on an honor system. Starting with tax year 2023, any of your potentially taxable digital asset transactions will be reported to the agency by an outside party. If you’ve ever held a job or invested in stocks, you know the money you make is reported to the federal government. That’s because you and the IRS get a W-2 form from your employer that reports your annual earnings and a Form 1099 from your broker that reports your stock transactions.Until now, however, there have been no comparable third-party reporting requirements in place for cryptocurrency trades and transfers — or for any other digital assets, such as NFTs.

But the recently passed infrastructure law includes provisions requiring crypto industry players that broker digital asset transactions to issue 1099-Bs for their customers’ accounts, which you will first receive in early 2024 to reflect your 2023 transactions.

And in a bid to make it harder to launder money, the new law also requires a business to report to the IRS whenever it receives more than $10,000 of cryptocurrency in a single transaction (or in two or more related transactions), just as it must when it receives cash above that threshold. Willfully failing to do so can be prosecuted as a federal felony.

These new reporting requirements will affect investors trading digital assets in a few ways.

You Can’t Stay Anonymous

The new reporting requirements represent a potential upside for crypto investors in two ways: They’re a sign that crypto is here to stay. And given the headache of trying to keep track of all your transactions, getting a 1099 may prove helpful. But the downside will be a loss of anonymity for those who want to keep their transactions private on principal, or who have not met their tax obligations.

When you open a bank or brokerage account, you have to provide a lot of personal information that gets cross-checked to confirm you are who you say you are. You have to provide your legal name, address, phone number and a Social Security number or other taxpayer identification number, among other things.But when you set up crypto-related accounts, the information you’re asked to give varies by platform.”Until this year, it was pretty common you could open [an account or digital wallet] with a name and email,” said Erin Fennimore, head of information reporting at TaxBit, a cryptocurrency tax software provider.Come 2023, that will change in many instances. “You’re going to be asked for personal information that you most likely have not been asked for in the past,” Fennimore said.And the platforms required to report on your transactions will have to verify that you are who you say you are. In addition, when a digital asset is transferred from one broker to another, the transferring broker will have to issue a statement to the receiving broker that includes basis and holding period information on the transferred asset so the receiving broker can satisfy its 1099 reporting requirements.