Regulating Down Under: Australian Taxation Office Preparing Bitcoin Guidelines
In early April the National Australia Bank (NAB) decided to cut ties with the bitcoin community and close any accounts that primarily dealt with the digital currency on May 2. The NAB believes dealing with digital currencies is too risky. Less than one week later, Australia’s first bitcoin ATM went live in Sydney, the first of several proposed ATMs in the land down under. To round off the month, the Australian Taxation Office (ATO) is preparing to meet with head figures of the Bitcoin industry along with accounting and tax experts to prepare guidelines on taxing and regulating all virtual....
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The Australian Taxation Office (ATO) has announced that it intends to work bitcoin capital gains and sales tax guidelines into its system for users to declare on tax returns this year. Its US equivalent, the IRS, is said to be investigating a similar implementation. ATO senior assistant commissioner Michael Hardy provided a statement to the Financial Review's Sunday program on Australian TV, saying the office has been monitoring the development of bitcoin and wondering how to tax such "new types of payment tokens". He said: "The ATO is working on a holistic understanding of the taxation....
Australia's tax authority is slated to provide tax guidance for users of bitcoin and other "alternative payment systems" before June 30th, according to a statement provided by the Australian Taxation Office's (ATO) senior assistance commissioner Michael Hardy on the Financial Review's Channel 9 program on Sunday. "The ATO is working on a holistic understanding of the taxation treatment of Bitcoin to be in a position to provide certainty for the Australian community," he stated. Hardy said that "paying for goods and services with new types of payment tokens such as Bitcoin still means that....
The Australian Tax Office (ATO) today released its long-awaited guidelines on how bitcoin businesses and individual users will be taxed in Australia. The guidelines are similar in nature to those issued by Singapore in January, which received a mixed response from the bitcoin community. In summary, bitcoins will not be regarded as 'money', and will be taxed in a similar way to other non-cash or barter transactions. As in Singapore, this raises the specter of double-taxation for some bitcoin transactions. Likely to be impacted most are businesses who have been transacting in bitcoin and....
ATO (Australian Taxation Office) just released its guidance on the tax treatment of cryptocurrencies. The set of regulations coincides with Australia's 2013-1014 income tax returns. It has been a long time coming as CoinTelegraph initially reported that the ATO is planning to prepare the guidelines, and then postponing, then offering slightly more clarity, and now here we are. Bitcoin's popularity in Australia as well as New Zealand is booming, and increasingly more local startups are looking to adopt the cryptocurrency. Currently, there are 190 active companies in Australia using Bitcoin....
The Australian Government announced in its report entitled “Backing Australia's Fintech” that the current double tax law on digital currencies including Bitcoin is soon to be reformed. Digital currencies such as Bitcoin were in 2014 established by the Australian Taxation Office (ATO) as intangible assets for goods and services tax purposes. Thus, payments involving bitcoin have been considered as a form of barter rather than conventional transactions. However, the major issue with the GST law on digital currencies is that Australian residents who purchase items or goods using bitcoin are....