Captive and Conservation

The IRS said Thursday it will be sending settlement offers with terms that are stricter than ones it offered last year under an earlier micro-captive initiative. The IRS has been focusing on cracking down on certain types of tax avoidance schemes, such as syndicated conservation easements and micro-captive insurance, while also stepping up tax enforcement efforts against holders of digital currencies such as Bitcoin and Ethereum, despite a decreasing number of IRS audits overall in recent years. The crackdown isn’t entirely new. In 2016, the Treasury Department and the IRS issued Notice 2016-66, which identified certain micro-captive transactions as having the potential for tax avoidance and evasion.