IRS won over the battle with Coinbase to release user information who transacted above 20,000$ during the year 2014-2015. This battle of Coinbase with the IRS was fought for over a year and finally Coinbase had to provide the customer data of 14,355 users. So anyone who performed any kind of transaction including buying, sending or receiving more than 20,000$ during 2014 & 2015 will eventually get notice from IRS this year.
Coinbase is being asked to provide the identified users name, birth date, address and taxpayer ID including all account activity performed by the user to the IRS. This also will involve accounts funded to or money received to the account on coinbase.
As per IRS around 1000 US citizens reported to have cryptocurrency last year. Coinbase has around 6 millions users hence the discrepancy appears to be huge for IRS. The ultimate question will be how will the crypto gains be taxed in this highly volatile market. Earlier many were under the impression that taxes should be pain only if converted to US dollars hence there is a lot of unknowns at this point.
Coinbase claims partial victory saying it was able to prevent 480,000 records from disclosure which is 97% reduction than the original requested numbers.