IRS and Four Other Nations Create Joint Task Force to Fight Cryptocurrency Crime

The Internal Revenue Service and tax authorities from four other countries are joining forces to create a cryptocurrency crime-fighting squad.

The other four nations–Australia, Canada, the U.K., and the Netherlands–will work with the IRS to locate and prosecute tax fraud and money laundering tied to cryptocurrency transactions.

Known as the Joint Chiefs of Tax Enforcement, or J5, will try their best to fight what is a transnational, loosely regulated, and hard-to-track world of cryptocurrency trading.

Thanks to the relative ease of facilitating cross-border transactions between parties, government agencies have argued that cryptocurrencies are ripe for tax evasion, black market purchases, and money laundering.

The J5 is a project to unify bureaucracies across multiple countries to work in unison at stymieing the threat of crimes connected to cryptos.

The IRS made cryptocurrencies taxable in 2014.

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