Nonprofits Side With Coinbase in Fight Against IRS Summons
Bloomberg BNA discusses our amicus brief defending privacy in Coinbase v. U.S..
The IRS is under fire from several nonprofit groups for its summons on Coinbase Inc., the U.S.’s largest virtual currency exchange.
If the court doesn’t quash the recently narrowed IRS summons, it risks sending a message that it’s OK for litigants to waste judicial resources by issuing overly broad subpoenas to see what they can get away with, the Competitive Enterprise Institute said in a brief filed Aug. 3 with the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California ( United States v. Coinbase, Inc. , N.D. Cal., No. 3:17-cv-01431, amicus brief filed 8/3/17 ).
“The IRS’s subpoena should be quashed in its entirety, not just narrowed,” said CEI, a public policy nonprofit. “To do otherwise would reward the practice of issuing overbroad subpoenas as a sort of bargaining position that produces better results for the government than coming to court with a well-framed subpoena in the first instance.”