https://linktr.ee/tomawezome Donations:
Right, it’s not about the IRS smelling millions, it’s about him wiring crypto to businesses he owned and him not reporting it on his taxes during expatriation. It’s all in the indictment papers. Pretty bog-standard tax fraud, nothing really out of the ordinary or exciting.
It looks like he could’ve dodged this by not making a lot of the decisions he made. It was definitely a bad move for him to wire crypto to bank accounts tied to businesses. It also looks like this became a big issue when he decided to go through expatriation, which required him to report and pay taxes for the capital gains. A law firm allegedly told him to “pretend” that he sold almost everything, leading him to not report any Bitcoin for both his assets and taxes, which seems like the ‘law firm’ was literally telling him to do fraud; he still went through with that despite how fishy it sounds? Can’t help but feel like any legal firm telling you to “pretend” anything is a scam… It seems like he brought a lot of this on himself, but it also shows how deeply the IRS will dig their claws into you if they smell a couple million dollars.
Indictment PDF: https://www.justice.gov/opa/media/1350116/dl?inline
https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/early-bitcoin-investor-charged-tax-fraud
Yeah, on the one hand I agree with your sentiment, but on the other hand it’s not that simple. Nothing in the government ever moves quick, and the IRS loves to give you plenty of time to dig your own grave as deep as you want.
https://www.taxnotes.com/featured-analysis/immaculate-expatriation-bitcoin-jesus-and-exit-tax/2024/05/10/7jhlf
The article above goes into more analysis about this situation, and includes a great quote that rings to what I previously mentioned:
“Here’s a useful trick for highly affluent readers who are desperate to avoid the exit tax: Live wherever you want, but don’t renounce citizenship. The constructive sale of assets and resulting taxable gains probably aren’t worth the trouble. Above all, don’t paint yourself into a corner by renouncing your citizenship and then calculating what your exit tax will be. The benefit of performing the calculation first is that it can influence your decision as to whether renunciation is worth it.”