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Comment by minimaxir | Hacker News Reader

If you're using Bitcoin as a means of payroll, you may want to look into the tax implications.

100%. We're definitely aware of the legal side, and we're working with a team of lawyers and accountants on this particular issue.

Good point.

I believe the IRS treats bitcoins as property, rather than an actual currency. But form what I've heard, when doing you're taxes, you actually just treat it as regular payroll taxes.

https://bitcointaxes.info/

From what our lawyers are telling us, that's right on the money. It's treated as a barter so you pay taxes on the USD equivalent if I remember correctly.

This is correct. From a tax perspective, this brings up a lot of headaches. Let's say you get paid $5000 per quarter (to make things simple):

March 31: 25BTC (price per BTC - $200) June 30: 20BTC (price per BTC - $250) September 30: 20BTC (price per BTC - $250) December 31: 10BTC (price per BTC - $500) Total: 75BTC

Now at the end of the year you need to calculate your income. You made 75BTC over the year, each of which was purchased at a different price. When you sell them to transfer them into USD, you need to keep track of _which_ bitcoin you are selling. If you sell one on December 31st, was it one from your first paycheck (in which case you made a profit of $300, which counts as income because you didn't hold it for over a year) or from the last one?

Simply buying BTC with USD from a company's bank account and sending it somewhere isn't difficult. To actually provide a service that doesn't leave employees in a tax nightmare they have no way of understanding is really what matters.

http://www.irs.gov/uac/Newsroom/IRS-Virtual-Currency-Guidanc...

You're absolutely correct. Part of our need to build this was to enable employees to have reporting for the BTC/USD price when they were paid in it vs. when they sell. The idea is for them to make their lives more simple in this regard.

This is exactly the same as automatically buying stock shares every month in a fixed dollar amount, and then having to figure out the profit/loss for taxation when you sell the shares. With stocks, the most straightforward approach is also to specify which shares you sold so that you can calculate their change in value accurately.

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