In an announcement posted on its official website on Monday, the Danish Tax Agency (or “Skattestyrelsen”) has declared that it will be collecting trader data from three cryptocurrency exchanges to ensure that users are paying their taxes.
According to the announcement, the three exchanges must provide data that includes “all purchases and sales of Cryptocurrencies made by their customers during the period from 1 January 2016 to 31 December 2018.” (Translated quote.) Along with this data, the exchanges must provide identifying information about each of their users, including names, addresses, and tax ID numbers (known as CPR numbers.)
”This is a Big Market that We Need to Look Into”
The announcement noted that this is the first time that the Danish Tax Agency will have access to this kind of data. “With the permission of the Danish Tax Council, we will for the first time gain access to the trades made via Danish exchanges,” said Karin Bergen, the Tax Agency’s director of personal income tax, in the announcement. “This gives us new opportunities with respect to exerting control in the field.”
The process has reportedly already begun--Skattestyrelsen has allegedly already been in contact with the cryptocurrency exchanges in order to establish a procedure for collecting the appropriate data. The Tax Agency will begin to process the data once all of it has been received.
The agency suspects that it might have quite a bit of work to do. “Without going too far, I think one can say this is a big market that we need to look into,” Bergen commented further. “When we recently received information from the Finnish Bitcoin exchange, it gave us a small portion of the larger picture, which we now have the opportunity to uncover even more of. However, it’s still too early to tell how many traders are out there and how much money has been traded.”
Finland Tipped Off Danish Tax Authorities; Denmark Has Plans to Inform Foreign Governments, Too
Indeed, Danish traders who are unhappy with the new decree can blame Finland, at least in part--the decision, which was made in December, reportedly comes as the result of information sent from the Finnish tax authority to the Danish tax authority.
The information regarded Danish 2,700 residents trading on a Finnish Bitcoin exchange, although the name of the exchange was not provided in the announcement. Now, Danish tax authorities also have plans to share data on crypto transactions made by foreign citizens on Danish cryptocurrency exchanges with each of their respective governments.
Denmark has remained relatively quiet in the global cryptocurrency scene, but a survey conducted last month by the country’s National Tax Board found that roughly 450,000 of its 5.7 million citizens have considered shopping with cryptocurrency.
While Denmark has not laid out a specific tax structure for cryptocurrencies, the agency has reportedly treated cryptocurrency gains similarly to gains on stocks in the past.
The news of the Danish tax authority’s crackdown coincides with a similar crackdown by Bulgaria’s tax authority. In 2017, US-based cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase fought a similar request from the US tax authority, which asked for the trading data of 500,000 of its users; in the end, Coinbase only turned over 13,000 trading records.
