Coinbase (COIN) says new U.S. tax-reporting rules for crypto are cluttered, confusing

Cryptocurrency trading giant Coinbase (COIN) said new U.S. tax reporting requirements are overly onerous for many crypto holders and add unnecessary clutter to the country’s taxation system.

While the idea is that taxable activity on crypto should be reported in the same way as with equities, for example, the rules require reporting transactions in stablecoins — whose value, by definition, doesn’t change — and the tiny amounts spent on the network fees known as gas.

The Nasdaq-listed exchange is currently sending millions of American crypto holders the new 1099-DA forms designed to bring crypto in line with the rest of finance. While all Coinbase’s customers will be affected to some extent, it’s the very large group of retail customers who are being hit with an unnecessary administrative burden on what amounts to small transaction flows, said Lawrence Zlatkin, the company’s VP of tax.

“Frankly, [small retail] transactional flow is so small, I just don’t know why we’re spending efforts as a country focused on them,” Zlatkin said in an interview. “I just think it just does a disservice to people when you’re trading 50 bucks, let’s say, that you get a form like this and you have to report gains or losses. That’s just not what the tax system is supposed to be about.”

For trading platforms, the new system means sharing details of customers’ digital asset transactions with the IRS. Customers are copied in using the form, so they can voluntarily reconcile their gains and losses with the tax authority.

As is often the case when trying to align crypto with traditional finance, however, there are challenges.

This year, Coinbase will provide the IRS only with the gross proceeds of digital asset sales, and not the net value or cost basis. As a result, the onus is on the trader to add what’s missing regarding their crypto acquisition costs and actual tax basis. (Coinbase will begin calculating cost basis on behalf of its customers starting next tax year.)

This will cause some degree of confusion, particularly among people who have never owned assets like stocks. And crypto brings its own level of complexity, given how holdings can be shunted between platforms and swapped in and out of various coins and tokens.

There are other obvious over-reporting wrinkles in the system that need to be ironed out, Zlatkin said, such as the need to report stablecoin holdings, whose value, by design, is fixed.

“People should pay taxes where they have income,” Zlatkin said. “Do you have income on USDC? No, you don’t. So why are we reporting USDC transactions? And we’re reporting those on our exchange as there’s no blanket exemption for USDC. That, to me, clutters the system.”

Gas fees, the small crypto transactions used to pay blockchain costs, just add to the reporting clutter, Zlatkin said.

“Gas fees might be 50 cents, a buck — do we have to disclose that? Is that a valuable use of resources to collect revenue? And I would posit that the answer is no,” he said. “We should focus on where there’s real income to get people to voluntarily comply. But not where there’s no income, such as in stablecoins or in tiny, tiny transactions that are mostly network fees.”

Coinbase’s goal is to educate and, moving forward, to create tools that help make the sometimes onerous task of calculating cost basis on crypto easier, said Ian Unger, the exchange’s director of tax reporting information.

When an equities investor sells stocks or moves their shares between brokers, those transactions come with transfer statements, so the cost basis transfers with it, he pointed out.

“That’s not the world we live in today for crypto assets,’ Unger said in an interview. “There could be a world where some of this does get easier for those who buy and sell on one exchange and want to move to another exchange. But we’re not there yet, and so until we get there, there’ll be a lot of confusion.”