The Kazakh budget has not received the expected amount of fees from crypto mining as the government has shut down lots of miners to “ensure energy security,” the government said.
The government of Kazakhstan, one of the world’s largest countries by the Bitcoin (BTC) mining hash rate distribution, has reported budget earnings derived from cryptocurrency mining.
On May 30, Kazakhstan’s state revenue committee of the Ministry of Finance released a report on the amount of total energy fees paid by local crypto miners in the first quarter of 2022.
According to the report, Kazakhstan’s budget added 652 million Kazakhstani tenge ($1.5 million) in energy fees from crypto mining in Q1 2022 after the government introduced a digital mining fee on Jan. 1, 2022.
The committee stressed that a significant amount of the expected sum of fees has not been received by the budget as the government has shut down a wide number of crypto mining firms in order to “ensure energy security.” Additionally, the authority mentioned that the government is considering increasing local fees for cryptocurrency mining as part of the new crypto bill.
The committee also noted that tax reporting on digital mining-related payments is not provided for by Kazakhstan’s tax code. On May 25, the Kazakh parliament passed in the first reading the amendments to the national tax code to introduce the crypto mining tax tied to the electricity prices consumed by mining entities.
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In late 2021, the Data Center Industry and Blockchain Association of Kazakhstan estimated that cryptocurrency mining could bring as much as $1.5 billion in revenue for the country in five years. As previously reported, Kazakhstan is one of the world’s largest countries by BTC mining hash rate. According to the latest update of the Cambridge Bitcoin Electricity Consumption Index, Kazakhstan was the third-largest BTC mining location in the world as of January 2022, with the hash rate share amounting to 13%.
