The Ministry of Finance proposes amendments with fines or jail for hiding cryptocurrencies when submitting declarations.

The Russian Ministry of Finance prepared amendments to the Tax, Criminal and Criminal Procedure Codes and the Code of Administrative Offenses. According to them, those owners of cryptocurrencies who at least twice in three years did not report to the tax authorities on transactions with digital currencies in the amount of 45 million rubles or more should be imprisoned for up to three years, RBC found out.

The Ministry of Finance also proposes to oblige individuals and organizations to inform the tax authorities about transactions with digital currency in excess of the amount equivalent to 600,000 rubles per year. The amount is calculated based on the market price of the digital asset at the date of each transaction.

The fine for failure to submit a report on digital currency transactions in excess of 600,000 rubles will be at least 50,000 rubles. Fines from 100,000 to 300,000 rubles are proposed for the systematic concealment of information about transactions with digital currency on a large scale, with fines from 500,000 to 2 million rubles proposed for those who do not submit tax declarations on digital currency transactions worth especially large amount (45 mln and above).

In addition, according to the text of amendments, organizers of the issue and circulation of digital currency should be obliged to identify customers and their representatives, beneficial owners, and also to notify Rosfinmonitoring about their suspicious transactions, Interfax reports.

“Both our and international analysts and the European Union have published this kind of information that money laundering and, in general, criminal financial turnover has shifted to cryptocurrencies. Formally speaking, the amendments of the Ministry of Finance are connected with the increased danger of cryptocurrency in terms of money laundering,” Deputy Finance Minister Alexey Moiseev explained the new initiative in a conversation on Business FM.