U.S. tax authorities want assistance with accessing hardware wallets for digital currencies, Vice reported Thursday (April 29), citing a document posted on the agency's website in March 2021.
IRS Criminal Investigation, the Internal Revenue Service's law enforcement division, and the Digital Forensic Unit want contractors to develop methods to break into digital wallets.
A number of investors who have digital currencies store their cryptographic keys on a personal device or exchange that they use for transactions. In contrast, certain people want a little extra security and use hardware wallets. These are small physical drives that keep a user's keys safe and are not connected to the internet.
However, the security of hardware wallets poses a challenge for those dealing with a case. Agencies may have a hardware wallet physically but may not be able to access it if the suspect is unwilling to help.
According to reports, the IRS is also looking for technology that it can reliably use in different cases in the future – not tools or solutions that can only be used once.
"The explicit result of this contract is the taming of cybersecurity research into measured, repeatable, consistent digital forensic processes that can be trained and tracked in a digital forensic laboratory," the document said, according to Vice.
The news comes when IRS Commissioner Charles Rettig told the Senate Finance Committee Tuesday (April 13) that the country's new popularity of digital currency means the country is not levying about $ 1 trillion in taxes a year. Cryptos are a challenge for the agency to monitor and collect.
According to Rettig, non-fungible tokens (NFTs) are just a similar problem for the agency.
"So now we have these non-fungible tokens that are essentially collectibles in the crypto world," Rettig said, according to a published report. “These are not visible elements. The crypto world is not visible. "
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