Bithumb Exchange receives an additional tax claim of $ 70 million

The South Korean Internal Revenue Service issued Bithumb an additional $ 69.5 million invoice for cryptocurrency trading.

Such a huge claim came to the company because ofthe fact that, according to inspectors, until January 2018, the exchange did not correctly withhold income tax from foreign customers. As a result, all income of non-residents was attributed to other income and actually recognized as assets, therefore, instead of the personal income tax, the capital gains tax rate of 22% was applied to the entire amount.

Bithumb disagrees with this amount and plans file a lawsuit against the tax claim to make adjustments to the calculations.

Theoretically, the exchange can withhold funds from foreign customers retroactively, but this is practically impossible to do.

The situation happened on the eve of legal reforms,governing the taxation of profits from operations with cryptocurrencies, which should be adopted in 2020. Perhaps the inspectors accelerated the process before the expiration of the five-year deadline for filing tax claims.

Many researchers recognize that traditionalthe tax system is not working efficiently enough, so in order to exclude the human factor, they decided to use artificial intelligence and big data to detect financial fraud.