Japan’s minister of finance, Fukushiro Nukaga, doubts that the public would condone a change in cryptocurrency taxation in the Asian country, write Cointelegraph. Any change would essentially create a special case for cryptocurrency by lowering taxation to 20% from the standard rate which could be as much as 55%, which would be called a “separate settlement taxation”.
At yesterday’s Upper House Budget Committee Meeting, Japan’s deputy prime minister Tara Aso said that any change which would lower cryptocurrency tax would be seen by the Japanese public as unfair, concluding that a change to digital currency’s “miscellaneous income” classification was unlikely.
Japan has seven income tax brackets, with the tax rates ranging from 5% to 45% based on earnings. The Policy Research Institute of the Japanese Ministry of Finance commented that the maximum income tax rate now stands at as high as 55% including 10 percentage points for the local individual inhabitant tax.
Many cryptocurrency investors, objecting to being liable for the higher rate, in a similar move to recent public objections in France this year, signed a petition on Change.org calling for the National Tax Office to tax crypto at the lower rate in the same way as they would do stocks which is nearer to 20%. Reportedly, 11,786 participants from within the crypto industry have signed the petition.
Aso made his comments in the light of Japan’s Financial Services Agency (FSA) recently handing out improvement notices to crypto exchanges, which saw the resignation of two vice-presidents of Japan’s self-regulatory cryptocurrency exchange body.
He felt, perhaps influenced by recent events in the country, that cryptocurrencies’ future as part of the international finance sector was uncertain, but again, like so many other government officials around the world, chose to differentiate between cryptocurrency and its underlying technology which he praised.
Japan’s licensed cryptocurrency exchanges have also recently formed a self-regulatory body that will have enforcement power over its members. The organization would be able to create a whitelist of favorable exchanges while being able to pressure exchanges into delisting any cryptocurrencies the FSA might regard as suspect.
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