Declare your Bitcoin Today — Practical Advice on Crypto Taxes

In a recent Benzinga article that I posted regarding Bitcoin and Taxes, experts stated that there are 18 to 21 million new retail crypto investors who are going to have to deal with declaring crypto gains.The zeal with which Bitcoin HODLers have celebrated the meteoric rise of BTC is hard to overstate. Tweets yesterday are calling for BTC to break the $50,000 barrier, and with over a 300% gain in the past 12 months and Bitcoin’s price currently, $46,950.00, the predictions of Bitcoin reaching $100,000 or more by end of the year don’t seem unreasonable.However, April 15th is just two months away, and investors in the U.S. will have to face declaring crypto gains on their taxes — even though they and their CPAs may have no experience with doing so. The IRS is paying attention and has added a first-page area to declare these gains, but decentralized investments carry new challenges when communicating with a centralized government that has a naturally centralized idea of what property and gains mean.We spoke with Wendy Walker, Solution Principal for Sovos. Wendy has helped lead Sovos’ go-to-market strategy focused on growing the Tax & Regulatory Reporting line of business. Wendy believes in a fair and transparent tax system and a system that provides administrative ease. Her philosophy is to advocate for business and individual taxpayers while balancing the need for fairness and transparency in the tax system.Here are Wendy’s full responses to our questions, with some editing for length.There are more retail investors than ever since the 2020–21 Bitcoin bull run — do you anticipate problems in filing taxes in the US based on crypto earnings?It’s fantastic to see the retail investor crowd embrace this new asset class. That said, I do anticipate many individuals will encounter challenges when attempting to file their…