Sources: the Treasury Department and IRS are likely to postpone a January 2023 starting date for crypto companies to track clients' captial gains and losses
The US government's bid to collect billions of dollars in taxes is hitting a snag, with the Biden administration poised to delay … Tweets: @allyversprille Tweets: Ally Versprille / @allyversprille : SCOOP on @TheTerminal now. IRS and Treasury are likely to delay new reporting rules for crypto brokers, according to people familiar who asked not to be named because a final decision hasn't been made. Move would push back efforts to collect billions in taxes from traders.
Context & Ripple Effects
This scoop lands mid-arc in Washington's push to tax crypto trading. The $10,000+ transfer reporting requirement announced in May 2021 framed digital assets as a tax-evasion risk, and the January 2023 broker-reporting start date was supposed to be the enforcement mechanism — requiring platforms to track clients' capital gains and losses the way stockbrokers do.
A delay here would prove consequential: when Treasury finally issued its formal proposal a year later, it treated exchanges like stockbrokers but pushed the reporting start to 2026, and the rule was only finalized in June 2024 — meaning this postponement effectively reset the whole timeline rather than shifting it by months.
First-order effects
- Crypto brokers and exchanges get immediate relief from building cost-basis tracking and IRS reporting systems on the January 2023 deadline, deferring what is a major engineering and compliance lift.
- The Biden administration's stated goal of collecting billions of dollars in taxes from traders slips further out, since unreported gains stay invisible to the IRS until brokers must file.
Second-order effects
- The delay hands Treasury time to define who actually counts as a 'broker' — the ambiguity that resurfaces in its 2023 proposal extending stockbroker-style gross-proceeds reporting to exchanges.
- Exchanges redirect near-term budgets away from tax-compliance builds toward other regulatory fronts, while tax-software vendors lose an expected 2023 revenue catalyst.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds — a finalized broker rule only landing in 2024 with reporting starting 2026, alongside the IRS declining to enforce the $10K receipt rule — crypto tax enforcement becomes a phased, multi-year buildout rather than a single mandate, leaving a long window where trading gains go unreported.
- Structurally, the endgame is exchanges absorbed into the same information-reporting regime as securities brokers, closing the gap that let digital-asset trades escape the tax net traditional brokerage never had.
The trend: US crypto tax reporting is sliding from rapid-fire mandates into a multi-year phased implementation, with each delay pushing full broker-level visibility over trader gains toward the back of the decade.