Re:IRS records reveal how the wealthiest avoid income tax
by jkhdigital on Tuesday June 08, 2021 @08:52AM
(#27434473)
As someone who is currently undergoing a tax audit for a year in which I reported ~$20M in cryptocurrency trades but only realized about $10k in income from them, I can confirm that "fairness" does not appear to be a goal of the tax code. Cryptocurrency (and especially derivatives) really exposes some of the head-scratching aspects of the tax code around capital gains.
And it's not as if the current system is fair. You regularly see cases like that kid who won a trip to the ISS and had to give it up because it was valued at $X million dollars and to accept it he'd have to somehow pay hundreds of thousands of dollars in taxes. There's also the issues with stock options that come up here from time to time, where someone is owed millions in options that they can't actually use because they'd have to first pay a percentage of the value in taxes.