US court opposes a Coinbase user’s privacy appeal
The post US court opposes a Coinbase user’s privacy appeal appeared on BitcoinEthereumNews.com.
The US government has urged the Supreme Court to reject a petition from James Harper, a Coinbase user seeking to prevent the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) from accessing his cryptocurrency transaction records. In a filing dated May 30, Solicitor General D. John Sauer argued that Harper has no Fourth Amendment right to shield financial records held by the exchange. The government argued that Harper had voluntarily disclosed the information to Coinbase and that the IRS had acted within the law following a court-approved summons to obtain it. The filing also cited Coinbase’s privacy policy, cautioning users that information could be disclosed to law enforcement. IRS revealed underreporting of tax on gains from digital assets Harper’s case arose from a 2016 IRS investigation of pervasive underreporting of tax on gains from cryptocurrency. The IRS noticed a big difference between the millions of Coinbase users trading Bitcoin and the small number of taxpayers who reported their crypto earnings. Following these findings, the agency issued a “John Doe” summons that required Coinbase to hand over records about customers who trade in large amounts. Harper, who dealt in Bitcoin through Coinbase in relevant years, was against the IRS’s action. He, therefore, sued the agency, alleging that the IRS’s actions constituted an unconstitutional search of his financial information. However, lower courts disagreed with Harper’s claims, concluding that Coinbase’s records are business documents and not Harper’s private papers. They then gave the IRS the go-ahead to access the records. The government argued that Supreme Court precedent is on the IRS’s side. This is because it stressed that people have no expectation of privacy over financial records maintained by third parties Coinbase. It referred to past decisions on cases like United States v. Miller. The Supreme Court has not yet announced if it will take up the…
Filed under: News - @ May 31, 2025 11:25 am