The US Supreme Court has refused to take a long -term privacy case involving an internal income service (IRS) Request for data on thousands of Coinbase customers.
In a Monday order, the judges denied a petition for a writing of Certiorary in the essentials, a green light to appeal an appeals decision-from a coinbase customer who said the IRS’s 2016 posts gripped his fourth change rights giving Americans’ protection against unreasonable searches and seizures of the government.
The applicant, James “Jim” Harper, initially brought a case against the IRS by 2020, almost a year after he and thousands of other coinbase customers received letters from the IRS, warned them that they potentially did not report income and pay the resulting tax from crypto transactions or that they did not report their transactions correctly.
In his suit, Harper claimed that the IRS ‘so-called “John Doe Summons”-as the Agency uses to sniff potential tax violations from unknown persons by forcing financial institutions to give them items and other information that the agency can use to identify potential offenders-against coinbase.
“Where it once lacked authority to look into a person’s private papers, even with the use of a subpoena, Internal Revenue Service has now acquired the power to demand access to anyone’s private information without any legal process,” Harper’s lawyers wrote in their case. “The IRS requires access even when a person has entered into a contract with a third party who promises to protect his private information from such intrusion.”
By 2021, a New Hampshire court threw out Harper’s suit with the IRS. Harper appealed, and in 2023, another judge of the New Hampshire District Court, sitting again with the IRS and rejected the case and wrote, “As the Supreme Court recently confirmed,”
