The government of the Republic of South Africa (South Africa) established a working group on the regulation of cryptocurrencies, it should provide during the coming year. This became known to local media from the response of the Minister of Finance of South Africa Mboweni Tito (Tito Mboweni) to a parliamentary question.
“It is expected that after extensive discussion and participation of the industry working group for regulation of scriptaction will be ready to produce a final research paper on this issue for 2019,” said the Finance Minister.
According to him, the working group included representatives of the financial intelligence Centre, Directorate for oversight over the financial sector, Treasury and Reserve Bank (SARB) and of the revenue Service of South Africa (SARS).
The Finance Minister said that SARS is already working to incorporate cryptocurrencies in the tax return for the following year. It is assumed that for the purposes of taxation of the cryptocurrency will not be classified as assets held for personal use. Received in the transactions losses can be offset only with profits from cryptocurrency. For the collection of VAT scriptactive will be treated as financial services.
We will remind, earlier the Deputy Governor of the SARB Grape Francois (Francois Groepe) stated that the Central Bank would prefer to consider cryptocurrencies as tokens, not as currency, because they don’t have the functionality of money. He also stressed that the traditional banking and financial supervision is not suited to digital assets. Meanwhile, according to the survey finkompany Old Mutual, about 15% of South Africans see themselves in the future, investors into the cryptocurrency. This figure is lower than in the United States and Western Europe, according to polling company Ipsos — 21% and 25%, respectively, but is at the same level with Australia.
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