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On Friday, Coinbase told its customers that it’s going to comply with a court order and hand over around 13,000 customers’ data to the IRS within 21 days.
Coinbase decided to now comply with the request that IRS made back in November 2016, where they asked for Coinbase to send them records of all people who bought bitcoin from 2013 to 2015. The reason why IRS did this is so they can seek out those individual who were evading cryptocurrency taxes. Anyone that’s been affected by the court order should now have received an email from Coinbase regarding the action.
Before complying with the court order, Coinbase heavily resisted it. Ultimately though, last November, the Fan Francisco court ruled that Coinbase must turn over identifying records of al users who completed transactions of more than $20,000 through their accounts in a single year between 2013 and 2015. The data the IRS requested includes taxpayer IDs, names, dates of birth, addresses, and transaction records for the requested time period.
Coinbase, in an email and on its website Friday, made note that it tried hard: “Coinbase fought this summons in court in an effort to protect its customers, and the industry as a whole, from unwarranted intrusions from the government.” Coinbase informed its 13,000 affected costumers that the “court order requires us to produce information specific to your account,” and further added that it could not provide any legal or tax advice.
