Head of Russia’s Federal Tax Service: We are closely engaged with the cryptocurrency market.

The Federal Tax Service (FNS) of the Russian Federation is currently actively studying the cryptocurrency market, said the head of the agency Daniil Yegorov in an interview with RBC.

“We are now quite closely engaged with this market, understanding that this settlement system could create a fairly substantial erosion of the tax base,” he said.

The head of the FNS noted that anonymisation technologies can be used to evade taxes, but participants in the digital space still leave traces.

Yegorov stated the need to declare ‘points and volumes of settlement’ as the key stakeholders of any such systems, as well as by users.

As reported in February, the State Duma of the Russian Federation passed in the first reading a bill on the taxation of crypto-asset operations.

According to Anatoly Aksakov, the head of the State Duma Committee on the Financial Market, progress on the bill is slow due to “questions about substantive categories”, raised by regulators. 

Media reported that the Bank of Russia and the Ministry of Finance could not agree on access by tax authorities to bank accounts for monitoring cryptocurrency operations, but the ministry assured that there are no disagreements.

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