After conducting investigations into the operations of 21 crypto-mining companies over a span of four years, the Swedish Tax Agency has revealed that these firms owe over $90 million in taxes. The investigation found that 18 of these companies provided “misleading or incomplete” information in order to take advantage of tax incentives.
Some of the tactics employed by these crypto firms to avoid taxes included providing misleading business descriptions to evade value-added tax (VAT) on taxable operations, as well as finding ways to bypass import taxes on mining equipment and income tax on mining revenue.
According to the Swedish Tax Agency, the total amount owed by these crypto mining firms to the tax authorities is over 990 million Swedish krona ($90 million). This includes unpaid VAT of 932 million krona ($85.4 million) and tax surcharges of approximately 57.9 million krona ($5.3 million).
While the crypto mining firms have appealed against the $90 million demand from the tax agency, the administrative court has upheld the appeals of only two mining firms and rejected the rest. “The amounts above have been adjusted with regard to the verdicts” stated the agency.
In November 2023, Hive Digital Technologies, a crypto mining firm, acquired a commercial property and a data center in Boden, Sweden. The company plans to use the property to house its new generation of ASIC servers and increase its Bitcoin production. Hive currently operates data center facilities in Canada, Sweden, and Iceland, and is committed to using renewable energy to mine digital assets like Bitcoin.