Stablecoins Face Tax-Time Reckoning as GENIUS Act Sets Compliance Bar

Tax season is turning up the heat on stablecoins, the only digital assets currently regulated in the U.S.

Tax season, after all, exposes weak recordkeeping and inconsistent classification. In the stablecoin context, it also forces clarity on income recognition, custody arrangements and asset segregation.

Even Tether, which has had past difficulties in securing and maintaining relationships with major audit firms, released an attestation for its domestic stablecoin product, USAT, issued by a U.S. regulated bank this past Friday (Feb. 27) and reviewed by the Big Four accounting firm Deloitte.

While an attestation of USAT’s reserves is a far cry from a comprehensive audit, the broader lesson from the Deloitte report may be that the U.S. crypto sector is entering a compliance-intensive phase. The combination of AICPA criteria, regulated issuers and Big Four review establishes a new baseline under the GENIUS Act for what institutional-grade stablecoin reporting can look like.

And it’s happening just as the financial controls and disclosure discipline surrounding digital assets are increasingly coming under the CFO microscope.

Read more: Stablecoin Fragmentation Creates New Risks for Businesses

A New Baseline for Institutional Crypto

In crypto markets, “audit” and “attestation” can be conflated by observers despite their very different safety and soundness implications. An attestation validates management’s assertion against stated criteria at a point in time. It does not test enterprise-wide internal controls or assess ongoing liquidity management.

Deloitte explicitly clarified this in its report, noting that the firm did not evaluate compliance with laws or contractual obligations, nor the design or operating effectiveness of controls. It only attested to USAT’s composition as of Jan. 31, 2026, at 11:59:59 PM. No later and no earlier.

As of that moment in time, USAT reported 17,501,391 redeemable tokens outstanding and total reserve assets amounted to $17,604,716, resulting in a surplus of $103,325. Cash totaled $3,654,716, while $13,950,000 was held in reverse repurchase agreements collateralized by U.S. Treasury securities. The reverse repos were short-term, with a maturity date of Feb. 2, 2026, just days after the report date.

The use of U.S. Treasury–collateralized repos signals a preference for instruments that can be rapidly converted to cash with minimal price volatility. This aligns with the GENIUS Act’s intent to ensure that domestic stablecoins function as cash equivalents rather than yield-seeking investment vehicles.

In a sign of the prominence regulatory compliance is now taking across the stablecoin space, USAT appointed Bo Hines as its CEO in September to execute the company’s entry into the U.S. market. Until his appointment in the private sector, Hines had formerly served as the executive director of the White House Crypto Council and was a contributor to the GENIUS Act.

See also: Decoding Stablecoin Accounting for CFOs and Treasury Teams

The Role of the Issuer Institution

One structural shift in the USAT attestation model is the identity of the issuer. Anchorage is a federally chartered national trust bank regulated by the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency and acts as the issuer of USAT. That institutional wrapper is not cosmetic. It places stablecoin issuance within a banking-law perimeter rather than a loosely defined offshore structure.

Increasingly, the credibility of a stablecoin could now be becoming inseparable from the charter and supervision of its issuer. Institutional counterparties and auditors may scrutinize whether stablecoin token liabilities are backed by assets held under fiduciary obligations and not merely corporate promises.

As covered here previously, Anchorage received a $100 million investment from USAT’s parent company, the offshore stablecoin issuer Tether, on Feb. 4.

See also: NY Fed: Banks Holding Stablecoin Deposits Are Lending Less

For issuers, reverse repo income, fair value changes and operational costs must be accounted for consistently with both banking regulation and digital asset disclosure norms. For corporate holders, more questions can arise around the tax treatment of stablecoin transactions, impairment analysis and the classification of tokens as cash equivalents versus digital assets.

For CFOs outside the issuing entity, and particularly for those holding stablecoins on balance sheet, the reliability of a stablecoin as a treasury instrument depends not just on the peg but on the quality, liquidity and disclosure cadence of its backing assets. Due diligence can be extended to reviewing attestation scope, reserve composition and issuer governance.

The PYMNTS Intelligence and Citi report “Chain Reaction: Regulatory Clarity as the Catalyst for Blockchain Adoption” found that blockchain’s next leap will be shaped by regulation; that evolving guidance is beginning to create the foundations for safe, scalable blockchain adoption; while at the same time, implementation challenges continue to complicate progress.