A U.S. federal judge has denied attempts to stop the Internal Revenue Service (IRS), the U.S. government agency “responsible for collecting taxes and administering the Internal Revenue Code, the main body of federal statutory tax law of the United States,” from summoning a man’s transaction history from the crypto exchange Bitstamp.
According to a report by Coindesk, on Monday (November 25), Judge John Coughenour of the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Washington rejected a petition by a resident of Washington State to prevent the IRS from getting hold of information about his crypto holdings and transactions history.
On June 27, William A. Zietzke filed a petition to judicially quash an IRS summons that had been served on Bitstamp USA.
In Monday’s ruling, although Judge Coughenour did not quash IRS’s summons, he did ask the IRS to narrow the scope of this summons to only those transactions occurring in 2016.
Among the arguments rejected by the judge were (1) that the summons had been issued in bad faith and (2) that the summons violated his Fourth Amendment rights to a reasonable expectation of privacy.
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