Argentina Joins the Global Big Brother

• Argentina has joined the final stage of the CARF schedule, along with Mexico and the United States.
• This commitment adds to the changes already in effect in the local information regime regarding wallets.

The fiscal clampdown on bitcoin and cryptocurrencies continues to tighten, and this time the news comes from the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD): Argentina has formally committed to implementing the "Crypto-Asset Reporting Framework" (CARF) and to conduct its first automatic exchange of information on crypto-asset operations no later than September 2029.

What is CARF?

CARF is the international standard developed by the OECD to apply the same logic that has governed traditional bank accounts since 2014 through the "Common Reporting Standard" (CRS) to the world of crypto-assets. Under this regime, exchanges, brokers, and other crypto-asset service providers (CASPs) must identify their users (name, tax residence, tax identification number) and report annually to their local tax authority the details of relevant operations they carry out: purchases and sales against fiat currency, exchanges between crypto-assets, transfers between users, and certain commercial payments.

This information is then shared annually with the tax authority of the country where each user has their tax residence.

There are already 77 jurisdictions that have adhered, which will begin exchanging data in a staggered manner: most (including Brazil and almost the entire European Union) will do so starting in 2027, a second group (Switzerland, Canada, Australia, and Mexico, among others) from 2028, and a final group from 2029.
The OECD shows the blocks in which countries will join its information-sharing regime. Source: OECD.

The news: Argentina now has a date

Until recently, Argentina was among the "relevant" countries for CARF that had not yet formally committed to implementing it, although it was estimated that sooner or later it would join, just as it had done with the CRS. That uncertainty has now been resolved.

The OECD confirmed that Argentina has committed to implementing CARF and to conducting its first automatic exchange of information on crypto-assets no later than September 2029. With this, the country is positioned in the final stage of the schedule, alongside Mexico and the United States.

Integrating this "last wave" is not a minor detail: unlike countries that already must have their data collection mechanisms in place, Argentina has a broader timeframe to adapt its internal regulations, train information agents, and develop the necessary technological infrastructure before starting to share this data with the rest of the world.

In any case, Argentina has had an internal information regime that exchanges must comply with monthly since the end of 2019; in fact, the tax authority already collects information on users' public keys.

What information will exchanges share?

According to the details provided by the OECD regarding CARF, the affected crypto-asset service providers must apply due diligence procedures to identify reportable users (individuals and entities and, where applicable, their controllers) and collect their identity and tax residence data.

Based on this, they must report the transactional activity of these users in an aggregated manner, broken down by type of crypto asset and class of operation: purchases and sales against fiat currency, exchanges between crypto assets, transfers, and certain payments made with crypto assets. Among other data, the amounts or aggregated values, the number of units involved, and the number of transactions carried out during the period will be reported.

Unlike the CRS, which is primarily structured around financial accounts, their balances or values, and certain yields produced from them, the CARF particularly focuses on the transactional activity with crypto assets developed throughout the period. Rather than offering a snapshot of the user's wealth at a specific date, the CARF aims to provide tax administrations with information about what operations were carried out during the year and for what amounts.

What does this imply for users?

September 2029 may seem far away, but the experience of other information exchange regimes shows that these processes tend to accelerate once the political commitment is made. In this case, the global trend points towards greater transparency regarding operations with crypto assets.

However, the advancement of these mechanisms also opens another debate: that of privacy. The CARF assumes that a huge amount of information about the economic activity of millions of people will be collected by intermediaries, stored by tax administrations, and automatically shared among different countries. Beyond its fiscal purpose, the concentration and circulation of such a volume of data raises questions about its security.

Additionally, there is a risk that exceeds the fiscal: the personal security of the taxpayers themselves. The concentration of information that allows knowing or inferring the wealth and financial movements of a person makes these databases particularly sensitive targets. An eventual leak could not only facilitate fraud or identity theft but also expose certain users to extortion, threats, or physical attacks. And the risk is not merely theoretical: in 2019, the Bulgarian tax administration suffered a significant security breach that exposed, among other data, information obtained through the automatic exchange of the CRS, which led the OECD itself to temporarily suspend exchanges with that country.

Argentina itself already has records of leaks and security failures in public agency databases. In 2020, the Agency for Access to Public Information sanctioned the Argentine Federal Police for the incident known as "La Gorra Leaks," in which a web portal of the force was hacked and confidential information was leaked.

In a world where governments seek to know with increasing detail what assets we own, where we keep them, and how we use them, privacy becomes an increasingly scarce commodity. In this context, understanding the value of self-custody ceases to be merely a technical issue and becomes a concrete tool of financial sovereignty.

Bitcoin fixes this.

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