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A partnership between BitPay and Libra Tax aims to make life easier for thousands of bitcoin-accepting merchants who are working with BitPay.

 

BitPay and Libra Tax announced their new partnership yesterday, March 24th, in a joint press release. The new deal will allow all merchants processing payments with BitPay to pay their taxes with the help of Libra Tax. Bryan Krohn, the CFO of BitPay, commented:

“It’s tax season and if your business accepts crypto-currencies, like Bitcoin, then you need to get through the headache of reporting your bitcoin transactions to the IRS. Some new software launched by Libra Tax this week aims to make your bitcoin reporting as pain-less as possible”.

Indeed, in addition to Libra Tax for individual clients, the company has  recently launched more advanced services, Libra Business and Libra Pro, the latter being designed for accounting and audit firms with bitcoin clients. According to Jake Benson, the CEO of Libra Tax,

“A huge step forward for the legitimacy of this world changing technology will be the day when it earns respect among professional accountants and auditors. My mission is take us there”.

The Internal Revenue Service of the U.S. Treasury Department released a ruling on cryptocurrencies exactly a year ago, on March 25th, 2014. Under that ruling, virtual currencies are treated as capital assets and every single use of them must be taken into account when filling out a tax declaration. The task is made even tougher by the changing price of cryptocurrencies. And, according to Krohn, “where a casual user could have dozens, if not hundreds, of taxable events to report in a given year, imagine how many events a business accepting bitcoin would have”.

The companies hope that this partnership will encourage “wider public adoption of the platform by simplifying the process of Bitcoin accounting”.

Currently, according to the BitPay website, the company is working with 50,000 merchants worldwide.

Libra Tax is not the only bitcoin company offering to help bitcoiners with paying their taxes. Coyno, a Berlin-based startup, has recently launched a bitcoin bookkeeping application capable of generating tax reports. Circle, an American wallet provider, offered help with tax reports to its clients.