On 8 December 2022, the European Commission’s Directorate-General for Customs and Taxation (DG TAXUD) put forth a proposal for new tax transparency rules for all service providers facilitating transactions in crypto-assets for customers resident in the European Union (DAC 8). The recently agreed Markets in Crypto-assets (MiCA) Regulation does not provide a basis for tax authorities to collect and exchange the information that they need in order to tax crypto-asset income. Moreover, tax authorities currently lack the necessary information to monitor proceeds obtained using crypto-assets, which are easily traded across borders. As such, the Commission’s DAC 8 proposal puts forward changes to existing provisions on exchanges of information and administrative cooperation. It also extends the Directive’s scope to the automatic exchange of information with respect to information reported by reporting crypto-asset service providers (CASPs). The rules on due diligence procedures, reporting requirements and other rules applicable to reporting CASPs are largely based on the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) crypto-asset reporting framework. Indeed, this proposal arrives in the context of the parallel work within the OECD to agree on a standard for the exchange on information for tax purposes in relation to crypto-assets (the CARF) and the extension of the scope of the Common Reporting Standard (CRS) to cover e-money, which resulted in an agreement in August 2022 and was welcomed by the G20 in November 2022. The Commission’s draft legislative text will now be submitted to the European Parliament for consultation and to the Council of Ministers for adoption.
