Kraken Blasts IRS Summons as ‘Treasure Hunt’
Kraken is fighting back against the Internal Revenue Service, claiming that the agency’s requests for information about the bitcoin exchange’s users amount to a “unjustified treasure hunt.”
After reaching a deadlock in negotiations to reduce the scope of the government’s investigation, Kraken is now asking a federal judge in San Francisco to urge the IRS to back down. The agency said it is looking into users who may be underreporting their tax liability.
The IRS claimed in a petition to enforce its summons filed in February that it is looking for Kraken accounts that did at least $20,000 in cryptocurrency trading in any single year from 2016 to 2020.
The IRS “wants more — and for a much larger universe of users,” Kraken’s lawyers stated in the filing.
San Francisco-based Kraken is a top crypto exchange with daily trading volume of roughly $650 million globally.
In February, Kraken agreed to pay $30 million to settle allegations by the Securities and Exchange Commission that the firm’s staking service was an illegal sale of securities.
(With inputs from Shikha Singh)
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