Part 8 of our "Crypto Explained Well" series. Most accountants are excellent at tax and have never handled a wallet. If that's yours, this is the checklist to put in front of them, so nothing important gets missed.
Crypto tax goes wrong less from dishonesty than from a competent accountant not knowing the right questions to ask. The information they need is specific and not obvious from a bank statement. Here is what to gather and what to make sure they handle.
What to Gather Before You Sit Down
- Every exchange account: including ones you stopped using; export the full transaction history from each
- Every wallet address: hardware, mobile, browser; the on-chain activity matters as much as the exchange records
- The full event list, not just sales: crypto-to-crypto swaps, staking and rewards income, airdrops, payments made and received; many are taxable events people don't think of as "selling"
- Cost basis data: what you paid for each holding and when, which determines the gain; this is the piece most often missing and hardest to reconstruct years later
Make Sure They Handle These
- Crypto-to-crypto is a taxable event: swapping one coin for another usually triggers a gain or loss, even though no "real money" moved. Accountants used to traditional assets miss this constantly.
- Income vs capital: staking rewards, mining, and airdrops are often income at receipt and create a cost basis for a later capital event: two taxable moments, not one.
- Foreign-held still counts: assets on foreign exchanges or hardware wallets abroad are typically still reportable and taxable by your home authority; some jurisdictions also require a separate foreign-asset disclosure.
- The data is already reported: remind them the authority receives DAC8/CARF data, so the return needs to reconcile with it (see part 2).
The reconstruction is the whole job
The hard part of crypto tax isn't the maths; it's assembling a complete, accurate history across every exchange and wallet, classifying each event, and attaching a cost basis. Get that right and any competent accountant can finish the return. Get it wrong (a missing exchange, an unrecorded swap, a guessed cost basis) and the cleanest arithmetic produces the wrong answer. Spend the effort on the data, not the spreadsheet.
Where the Data Comes From
Reconstructing a multi-year, multi-venue history is exactly the extraction problem businesses face under DAC8: the same tooling that builds a CASP's reports can rebuild an individual's. See The DAC8 Reporting Workflow for how that reconstruction works.
Next in the series: Mixers, Tumblers, CoinJoin: What They Really Are.
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