Supreme Court Won’t Weigh in on Coinbase-IRS Dispute

The Supreme Court has rejected an appeal from a Coinbase customer fighting the IRS.

That’s according to a report Monday (June 30) by Bloomberg News on the ongoing battle between Coinbase account holder James Harper and the Internal Revenue Service (IRS).

According to the report, the court refused to question an IRS summons that had forced Coinbase to turn over transaction info on more than 14,000 customers. The justices rejected Harper’s appeal, which had argued that the IRS violated his Fourth Amendment rights.

Harper, who sued the IRS in 2020, had asked the Supreme Court to reexamine a ruling from 1976 which held that bank customers don’t have privacy rights in records held by their financial institutions.

A federal appeals court had upheld the IRS summons, issued during an investigation into what the government contends is wide-ranging underreporting of capital gains on cryptocurrencies.

“The lower court’s ruling will effectively strip millions of Americans of meaningful privacy protections over their most sensitive financial data — simply because they use modern financial service providers,” Harper argued.

Coinbase, the report added, had joined Harper in asking the Supreme Court to take up the matter. The company, the largest crypto exchange in the U.S., said it had resisted the IRS summons as long as possible without risking being held in contempt.

President Donald Trump’s administration, the report added, had urged the Supreme Court to quash the appeal, saying Harper “lacks any reasonable expectation of privacy in Coinbase’s records about his account.”

While Trump has taken a friendlier stance toward the crypto sector, his current and former administration had supported the IRS investigation, which began under President Barack Obama in 2016.

In other Coinbase news, the company recently announced the launch of a stablecoin payments stack developed for eCommerce platforms.

Coinbase Payments, which went live already integrated with Shopify, was built to help payment service providers (PSPs), marketplaces and eCommerce infrastructure providers to more quickly bring stablecoin payments to market.

“More than half of the Fortune 500 is building onchain, and a third of small businesses already use crypto,” the company wrote on its blog.

“And yet, despite growing demand, stablecoin payments remain out of reach for most platforms — held back by fragmented tooling, technical overhead, and a lack of production-ready infrastructure. Coinbase Payments changes that.”