Accounting & Tax Researcher-in-Residence: United States

[StevenLongCFO]

Accounting & Tax Researcher-in-Residence: United States

Focus Areas/Scope of Work Provide a variety of research regarding accounting and taxation services that are tailored to the Stacks ecosystem, including cryptocurrency investment transaction reconciliations (capital gain and loss report), tax planning, tax compliance, and tax return preparation. Leverage professional experience and knowledge to supply creative tax advice, APIs, and guidance for sub-chains and individuals in the Stacks ecosystem.

Potential Deliverables

• Consolidate and catalog research on crypto laws by interviewing subject matter experts.
• Hold monthly interviews with subject matter experts within the Stacks community to educate individuals on IRS regulations.
• Create an API that queries HIRO and Xverse transactions by wallet address on the Stacks' mainnet.
• Create a downloadable report linked to the API that sorts transactions of buying, selling, and minting Stacks SIP-09, SIP-10, and SIP-12 NFTs or tokens.
• Create a website designed to interact with wallet addresses (UI or UXI) where individuals can easily download their report(s).
• Create an API that merges information from a wallet's interaction with the Stacks mainnet, to a pre-form crypto IRS tax page, form 1040 Schedule D, and form 8949 if necessary.

Background & Skills The individual should have 5+ years of government, non-profit, or personal finance and tax experience in accounting, tax preparation, corporate finance; or be a Certified Public Accountant or Certified Tax Preparer.

Nominations @eparrot and @forager (https://github.com/foragerr @foragerr) (https://github.com/egtalbot @eparrot)

[egtalbot]

I don't think either @foragerr or I have a finance background (for me I have worked in IT for a bank and insurance company and created accounting reports). I consider myself more knowledgeable about US taxes than the vast majority of people, but I have no professional certification or training in that field. Obviously we have created the FatStx site which we expect to continue to expand and support.

One note on your last bullet - I am a strong believer in specialization, and I don't think that Schedule D, 8949, etc. are something the Stacks ecosystem needs to create. There are many crypto tax sites out there which specialize in turning transaction reports into tax forms, so IMO the need on Stacks is for the transaction reports (such as FatStx) to interact with those tax sites as seamlessly as possible. The current FatStx csv download can be rearranged as needed for a specific tax site's desired upload format, and future roadmap includes outputting csvs in formats required by those various sites. A future API is also possible, though the current site has no actual back-end to host an API.

[will-corcoran]

Hi @StevenLongCFO thanks for submitting this position proposal. Personally, I think its a great idea and could add a lot of value. We appreciate your efforts on this.

@egtalbot | @foragerr It sounded like you did not feel like you were qualified for this specific position. Am I correct in this assumption? If one or both of you feel like there is a variation of this position you would be well suited to take on - and you have a serious interest - please let me know and we can schedule an initial interview.

Best, Will

[egtalbot]

Hi Will! I guess I'll divide this answer into two things:

1.Neither of us are tax professionals. I know quite a bit about taxes, and feel confident in creating the requirements of a system for turning blockchain transactions into something more usable for taxes. Most of what Steven put in the description probably doesn't require a tax professional to do since a chunk of it is actually coordinating with such experts to provide information. Maybe just the last bullet. My observation was due to the background and skills section, which is very specific and neither of us are anything like that. If we remove the last bullet then I would think the requirements and skills would actually be quite different, as a combination of tech skills and information/SME coordination skills (two VERY different skillsets) are required.

2.That said, neither of us are looking for a full-time or even a part-time job. At least I don't think he is, I know I'm not. What I like to get involved with are things with very narrow focus over a fairly short period of time. A few hours to write something up or create a web page or stacks on chain query. That way there's an endpoint and if my day job or other things becomes more burdensome I can step away as needed. FatStx is definitely on the larger side of the kind of thing I can work on with my current schedule, but we both felt it was a huge hole in the STX ecosystem that we knew how to fill. We do expect to continue to do some work to expand it and keep up to date but not with the scope envisioned here. We haven't spoken about it but I suspect if someone were able to make a more consistent commitment to expanding it as part of a residence program, we'd be delighted to hand it over and assist with a transition any way we can.

[foragerr]

Thanks @StevenLongCFO and @will-at-stacks, appreciate your efforts!

+1 : I strongly agree that the proposal as written is very valuable to the community of stacks users

+1 : Seconding what @egtalbot said, I do not possess the financial background or credentials called out in the original post

+1 : There is definitely still an opportunity to expand https://fatstx.github.io/ to integrate better with crypto-tax sites, I reckon the nature of that work (and our availability) aligns better with a stacks grant rather than an a residence position; Unless of course as @egtalbot said, someone else volunteers to dedicate more time to a residence position.