Senator Toomey Promises to Fix Flawed Crypto Brokerage Language In Infrastructure Bill
Pat Toomey – Senator and ranking member of the Senate Banking Committee – is not finished fighting the infrastructure bill. He recently vowed to fix flawed language within the legislation that stirred major controversy in August. He’s also taken issue with the newly released stablecoin report, which recommends regulating their issuers like banks.
Correcting Language On “Crypto Brokers”
The senator aired his thoughts during an interview with Yahoo Finance. In conversation with Jennifer Schonberger, he said he “absolutely wants to fix” the infrastructure bill’s language on cryptocurrency brokers.
Toomey and the rest of the crypto community have taken issue with this legislation for months. In totality, the bill is a monumental investment package of $550 billion, intended to build roads, bridges, broadband, and energy systems. To raise part of the money necessary, it would implement tax reporting requirements on cryptocurrency brokers.
However, “brokers” are defined to be “anyone who effectuates transfers of digital assets.” As Brian Armstrong – CEO of Coinbase – and others pointed out, this could include anybody from miners, to validators, to developers.
Toomey said that these reporting requirements would be onerous and unfeasible to actually follow:
“The language is badly flawed. It could impose reporting requirements on participants that have no ability to comply with [them], because they don’t have the information [they] would impose. Completely unreasonable.”
Toomey and other senators have negotiated an amendment to this language before. While all parties – including the administration – agreed on it, it never reached the bill due to what Toomey calls “a procedural problem.”
The bill currently remains bogged down in congress. Should it pass, the senator said there will still be an opportunity to fix it in subsequent legislation.
Toomey’s Defence For The Crypto Industry
Toomey is known to generally air on the side of the cryptocurrency industry in regulatory debates. Besides the infrastructure bill, the senator has also levied criticism at the US stablecoin report, recently unveiled by Gary Gensler.
The document suggests requiring stablecoin issuers to be “insured by depository institutions” or treated like banks. This is theoretically to prevent a “bank run” on issuers that irresponsibly manage the funds that back their tokens. However, Toomey believes this could hurt competition and innovation in the stablecoin space.
Featured image courtesy of CNBC.
