As reported by the French media outlet Capital yesterday, the lower house of the French parliament in the Assemblée Nationale has rejected the amendments made to the 2019 finance bill with regards to cryptocurrency taxation. This makes it the fourth rejection so far in an attempt to provide a compromise on cryptocurrency tax policy that makes it easy to blend with the French economy.
The chairman of the Finance committee rejected the four different amendments with the backing of Bruno Le Maire, the Minister of the Economy and Finance for the Macron government.
An advantage derived by the amendment as proposed will ensure that cryptocurrency transactions are treated the same as stock market transactions. Further, a distinction would have been made between regular crypto transactions and occasion ones. Both instances would have given crypto-asset owners and users a tax advantage.
More so, part of the amendment included an increase in the total annual cryptocurrency transaction volume from EUR 305 to EUR 3,000 or as high as EUR 5,000 in the tax exemption laws. This was dismissed by the chairman who said the current EUR 305 were “quite favorable”.
However, the stance of the chairman was that it could be reevaluated in the future should crypto-assets become more commonly accepted in the country.
On the receiving end, blockchain proponents seem to take the news sadly as they see the amendment as a setback on the adoption of cryptocurrency in the French market.
The president of the blockchain lobbyist group La Chaintech Alexandre Stachtchenko told Capital: “The most frustrating thing about all this is that none of the rejections were motivated or justified by the Chairman or the Minister”. More so, it implied that crypto-asset users should “take all the risks” while the money earned will “go into the coffers of the state”. In his opinion, this was “dramatic”.
Further, it was not long ago when two deputies from the national assembly recommended that EUR 500 million from public funds be invested into blockchain technology over the course of 3 years. The intention was to explore the application of blockchain technology.
France’s position in relation to the taxation policy about cryptocurrencies remains unclear. Its aim is still geared towards establishing a more global regulatory network as digital currency is used globally, and not just in France.
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