The US Treasury Won't Tell Us How Much Bitcoin It Owns
The Freedom of Information Act does not require agencies to answer to fishing expeditions, IRS tells The Rage.
Earlier this year, we filed a request with the Department of the Treasury under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) to disclose the amount of bitcoin held by the US Treasury, distinguished by bitcoin seized and bitcoin forfeited.
The request was made in light of our previous reporting that revealed that the US Marshal Service – the agency which manages the US Government's forfeiture program – holds less than 30,000 BTC; far off from the over 200,000 BTC advertised to be owned by the US Government as alleged by President Trump, among others.
Our reporting on the US Marshal Service's bitcoin holdings caused both confusion and outrage, that went as far as garnering responses from Senator Lummis of Wyoming, who speculated that the Government may have secretly sold its bitcoin stash.
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The background for said confusion was set by sites which attempt to track the US Government's bitcoin holdings, but do not differentiate between bitcoin that has been seized – meaning bitcoin that may have to be given back to victims of criminal activity, s.a. the inclusion of Bitfinex funds on the US Government's addresses displayed on the intelligence platform Arkham – and bitcoin that's been forfeited – meaning bitcoin that is actually the Government's property.
In our FOIA request, we asked the Treasury to produce "the amount of bitcoin held by the Dept of Treasury, distinguished between bitcoin seized and bitcoin forfeited"; A seemingly reasonable ask for an agency meant to establish a Strategic Bitcoin Reserve, for which such a distinction appears necessary.
But the Internal Revenue Service (IRS), on behalf of the Treasury, has now rejected our request, stating that the request is "overly broad in nature".
According to the response, FOIA regulations "require that the request describe the documents in sufficient detail to enable us to locate the records 'without placing an unreasonable burden upon the IRS,'" because "the FOIA is not intended to reduce agency personnel to investigators on behalf of the requesters or to allow requesters to conduct 'fishing expeditions' through agency files."
A new FOIA request has now been filed with the Treasury for records of bitcoin that have been forfeited to the US Government.
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