Arizona Senate Income Tax Bill Mentions Litecoin
Arizona under Senate Bill 1091 in Section 1, B has a proposed amendment working through state government that is trying to adopt Litecoin as a payment gateway for income tax liability payments. The particular section of interest is:
A taxpayer may pay their income tax liability using a payment gateway, such as bitcoin, litecoin or any other cryptocurrency recognized by the department, using electronic peer-to-peer systems. The department shall convert cryptocurrency payments to United States dollars at the prevailing rate after receipt and shall credit the taxpayer's account with the converted dollar amount actually received less any fees or costs incurred by the department for conversion.
Litecoin is mentioned as a payment gateway amongst Bitcoin with no mention of Ethereum or any other of the top 10 cryptocurrencies. A payment gateway is a service that processes and authorizes the payment between a store and a customer. In the case of income tax payments, Litecoin would be sent to an official Litecoin address of the Arizona government and instantly converted into USD at the current exchange rate within 24 hours.
Coin Desk doesn't seem to want to cover crypto news in full. In the Coin Desk article there is a link to the amendment text of the bill which does not specifically state Litecoin. Nowhere in their article does it mention Litecoin. However, the quote above is from this link and does, in fact, mention Litecoin as another alternative to Bitcoin as a payment gateway for tax payments. Also, what is up with their timestamp for the article? The only date I can see on the official text of the amendment is 2018-02-08, yet they updated their article on Jan 11, 2018 at 19:45 UTC | Updated Jan 12, 2018 at 12:12 UTC? Maybe I am missing something but that is a little more than odd. Hey, at least the Coin Telegraph article on this news got it right!
Arizona State Rep. Jeff Weninger, a co-sponsor of the bill, said to Fox News who interviewed him that:
It’s one of a litany of bills that we’re running that is sending a signal to everyone in the United States, and possibly throughout the world, that Arizona is going to be the place to be for block chain and digital currency technology in the future,
Another interesting bit of information in the Fox News article is that a University of Cambridge study estimates that the number of cryptocurrency wallets to be between 2.9 million and 5.8 million.
Update 2/14/2018: It does appear that strange time stamp issue has been resolved.