The Digital Mirror
Why the balance on a frozen crypto-exchange account is not, in any meaningful legal sense, income — and why the Polish Minister of Finance ought to say so out loud.
The Customer Opens the App
Picture a customer of a Polish cryptocurrency exchange who, on a Tuesday morning in April of 2026, opens his phone and looks at a number: 487,213.44 złoty. The figure is rendered in clean white type on a black field, two decimal places, the sort of typography meant to convey calm. For several months now, this customer has been unable to withdraw a single złoty. His withdrawal orders sit in a column marked pending. Customer support replies in courteous formulas. The exchange’s founder, in a March video, promised that withdrawals would resume; they have not.
The legal question, framed in the dry idiom of tax law, is whether this customer has realized income.
The philosophical question — and tax cases, properly examined, are nearly always philosophical — is whether the number on the screen reflects a person’s wealth or merely the picture of his wealth. For more than a decade, Bernard Madoff sent his clients elegantly printed monthly statements showing positions in blue-chip stocks, options, and hedging instruments. The statements bore his firm’s letterhead. In December of 2008, the world learned that none of these positions had ever existed. When the Second Circuit, in In re Bernard L. Madoff Investment Securities LLC (654 F.3d 229), was asked how to compute what each victim was owed, it had to choose between two methods. One — the “last statement” approach — would have honored the figures Madoff had sent. The other — the “net equity” approach — would compute what each customer had actually put in, minus what each had actually taken out. The court chose the second. The statements, the court said in effect, had been a kind of icon: a digital image of a wealth that had never been there.
The Polish customer staring at his phone is standing before a mirror image of the same question. Is the number on his screen taxable income?
This essay’s first contention is that it is not — and not by virtue of some interpretive sleight of hand, but by straightforward application of one of the oldest and least controversial doctrines in Polish tax law: the cash method enshrined in Article 11(1) of the Personal Income Tax Act. The second is that the Minister of Finance ought, urgently, under Article 14a § 1 of the Tax Ordinance, to issue a general interpretation confirming as much. The third is that taxpayers who, in earlier years, paid tax on “gains” reflected only in their exchange-account balances — gains they never withdrew, never possessed in any tangible sense — should be entitled to amend their returns and recover what they paid.
Each of these claims requires unpacking.
The Cash Method: A Foundation Hidden in Plain Sight
The right place to begin is one so obvious it is easy to walk past. Article 11(1) of the Act of 26 July 1991 on Personal Income Tax (consolidated text, Journal of Laws 2024, item 226, as amended; hereinafter, the “PIT Act”) provides that income consists — with a handful of statutory exceptions — of money and monetary values received by, or placed at the disposal of, the taxpayer in a calendar year, and the value of benefits received in kind or as other gratuitous benefits.
Three words do most of the work: received, or placed at disposal. This is the classical cash method, and the Polish doctrine has long described it with care:
As a general rule, in the case of the personal income tax, income arises at the moment of the taxpayer’s actual receipt (placement at his disposal) of specified amounts (the cash method).
(J. Marciniuk, Personal Income Tax: A Commentary, 18th ed., Warsaw 2017.)
Polish tax doctrine recognizes a number of categories in which the legislature has departed from the cash method in favor of the accrual method or some other special construct: business activity (Article 14), specialized agricultural production (Article 15), the disposal of shares and securities (Article 17(1)(6)(a)), in-kind contributions to companies (Article 17(1)(9)), the realization of rights from derivative instruments (Article 17(1)(10)), the disposal of real estate (Article 19), and undisclosed sources (Articles 25b–25g). The amending statute of 23 October 2018 added, to this list, income from the paid disposal of virtual currency (Article 17(1)(11)) — formally placing it outside the regime of Article 11(1).
But the carve-out does not abolish the cash method. On the contrary. The very definition of the taxable event, set out in Article 17(1f) of the PIT Act, retains the cash method whole and entire — and does so, what is more, on the face of the statute. “Paid disposal of virtual currency” is defined as the exchange of virtual currency for legal tender, for a good, for a service, or for a property right other than virtual currency, or as the discharge of obligations using virtual currency. Each of these four variants requires that the taxpayer actually receive something — a fiat unit, a good, a service, another property right — or that an obligation in fact be extinguished. In every case, the operation requires a real, observable accretion to the taxpayer’s estate. By giving virtual currencies their own regime, the legislature did not exempt them from the foundational requirement of an actual gain. It wrote that requirement, on the contrary, into the very text of Article 17(1f), in four variants whose common denominator is precisely the receipt of something in return. Whatever “receipt” means in Article 17(1f), it must be construed coherently with the concept of accretion to the estate that doctrine and the case law have built around Article 11(1) — and to which Polish administrative courts have returned with notable consistency.
What the Courts Have Said: Three Judgments, One Idea
The Polish administrative case law on this question, rare as it may be in tax jurisprudence, is exceptionally orderly.
The judgment of the Voivodeship Administrative Court in Kraków of 19 April 2023, I SA/Kr 217/23 — a case concerning staking under the Delegated Proof of Stake model — set out the controlling proposition with admirable economy:
The general principle in the personal income tax is that income arises at the moment of the taxpayer’s actual receipt (placement at his disposal) of specified accretions to his estate. […] This means that income arises only where the taxpayer has obtained a real accretion to his estate.
The court added that virtual currencies are not traditional money, and that the PIT Act provides no method for converting a crypto-asset into fiat — from which it follows that income within the meaning of Article 11(1) arises only when virtual currency is exchanged for traditional currency, or for a good or service.
The Kraków decision is the doctrinal anchor of what follows. It is also the source from which subsequent courts, including the Warsaw Voivodeship Administrative Court, drew their constitutional framing — invocations of the Constitutional Tribunal’s rulings in K 7/13 and P 49/13, and of the Supreme Administrative Court’s resolution in II FPS 4/14, on the principle that where a statute fails to define all the constituent elements of a tax, the gap cannot be closed by administrative interpretation.
The Warsaw judgment of 21 March 2024, III SA/Wa 179/24 — a case involving Lido staking and solo staking — adopted and developed the Kraków line. Addressing the receipt of staking rewards directly, the Warsaw court was unequivocal:
The applicant does not, in such a case, receive either money or monetary values within the meaning of the cited provision, and there is therefore no basis for asserting that he has realized income.
The Poznań judgment of 19 December 2024, I SA/Po 434/24, closed the triad with the cleanest formulation yet:
Income arises only where the taxpayer obtains a real accretion to his estate. Such accretion occurs at the moment of receiving traditional currency in exchange for virtual currency, or of receiving a good or a service whose real value at the moment of the transaction can be determined.
The line, then, is consistent. The receipt of virtual currency — by staking, by airdrop, by mining, by any other means — is not a taxable event. The taxable event arises only when the crypto-asset is exchanged for something whose value in traditional money can be ascertained and which has actually entered the taxpayer’s possession.
A Withdrawal Order Without a Withdrawal: The Anatomy of a Non-Income
This brings us to the heart of the matter. A customer of a Polish exchange deposits złoty, buys bitcoin, watches the price rise, sells bitcoin back into złoty, and submits a withdrawal order. In the technical sense — the sense the exchange’s interface displays — his account balance is now X. In the legal sense, which is the sense that matters, his situation is something else.
First: złoty in an exchange account is not money within the meaning of the National Bank of Poland Act. It is a digital ledger entry in the proprietary information system of a foreign legal entity (BB Trade Estonia OÜ), recording an obligation to deliver that sum to the customer once certain operations are performed. The customer holds a contractual claim — a receivable — against the exchange. He does not hold the money.
Second: “placement at disposal,” within the meaning of Article 11(1), means — as Polish administrative courts have consistently held — a state in which the taxpayer can incorporate the funds into his sphere of control without depending on the additional consent of the party providing them. The funds are at his disposal when he can reach for them whenever he likes, without anyone’s permission.
The customer of zondacrypto, who placed his withdrawal order — sometimes in January, sometimes in April of 2026 — and is still waiting, cannot, by any honest description, reach for his money. His situation is not the situation of someone whose cash sits in a bank account, accessible by card or through a banking app. The customer’s funds are not, physically, where he can get to them. They are, instead, asserted by a counterparty whose assertions are not being honored.
On these facts the legal proposition is straightforward, and we believe it self-evident: where a customer has placed a sell order on an exchange but the exchange has failed to remit the proceeds, no taxable income within the meaning of Article 17(1)(11) in connection with Article 17(1f) of the PIT Act has arisen, and no PIT obligation has been triggered.
Three points within this proposition deserve emphasis.
First, the question is not when the moment of taxation shifts — from the sale of the cryptocurrency to the receipt of the złoty. The question is whether, absent receipt of the złoty, a taxable event has occurred at all. Article 17(1f) requires an exchange, in the economic sense of an executed transfer, not in the merely bookkeeping sense of a journal entry.
Second, the appearance of a złoty figure on the exchange’s interface does not change the legal characterization. What the customer sees on his screen is — as in the Madoff case — the digital reflection of a claim, not the money itself. Until the claim is satisfied, the customer holds nothing that qualifies as “money or monetary values” within the meaning of Article 11(1).
Third, the rule applies regardless of the exchange’s solvency. Even if zondacrypto were perfectly solvent and were to pay every customer tomorrow, today — for taxpayers who have not received their funds — no income has arisen. Article 11(1) does not recognize a category of “contingent income” or “probable income.” There is income, or there is none.
The Floor Beneath the Floor: Pyramid Logic and the Cash-In, Cash-Out Method
The argument now descends a level.
Open-source materials — BB Trade Estonia OÜ’s 2024 financial statements, a Recoveris report on the state of the exchange’s hot wallet, the customer-support correspondence of the affected — suggest that the exchange’s business model in the period leading up to the withdrawal freeze may not match the model of a conventional crypto-asset trading platform, in which client assets are segregated and held one-for-one against client balances. The disclosed figures point, among other things, to a 75-million-euro loan, denominated in crypto-assets, to a related party; to a line item described as “use of client funds” that grew, year over year, by more than three hundred per cent; and to a sharp drawdown of the hot wallet revealed in independent on-chain analysis.
It is not our role, in this essay and at this stage of the proceedings, to formulate criminal-law characterizations of these facts. The professional ethics of any Polish attorney commenting publicly on a pending matter — under Article 212 of the Criminal Code and the disciplinary rules of the bar — counsel restraint. But it is permissible, and necessary, to take this constellation of facts into account in tax analysis, because the consequences for personal income tax are serious.
Suppose, hypothetically, that the exchange’s actual operating model, in some significant part, departed from the model of safekeeping for the client and approached a structure in which current withdrawal orders were funded by current deposits from new clients. The tax consequence is then this: the balances visible on the customer’s screen do not reflect — and, in the economic sense, never reflected — any real accretion to the customer’s estate. What the customer saw was a ledger entry. What the customer had was a claim against the company, met or unmet according to the company’s daily liquidity from new deposits.
In such a model, the only method of accounting that makes economic and legal sense is cash in, cash out. What matters is what the customer put in (in złoty, in euros, in crypto-assets at the rate prevailing on the day of deposit), and what the customer took out (the same). The difference — positive or negative — is the real gain, or the real loss.
This is not an exotic conception. It is the very method that the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit applied to the victims of Bernard Madoff (the Net Equity case, 654 F.3d 229 (2d Cir. 2011), with certiorari denied in 2012). It is also, with various refinements, the method applied by administrative bodies in the bankruptcies of FTX and Mt. Gox: claims are valued as of the date of insolvency by reference to actual deposits and withdrawals, not by reference to the nominal balances entered in the platform’s books.
For the Polish taxpayer, the consequence is simple. If, while using zondacrypto, he conducted transactions inside the exchange — buying and selling cryptocurrencies without ever moving funds out — none of these transactions generated taxable income. Not by any concession of the tax authority, but because at no point was there a real accretion to the taxpayer’s estate. A złoty balance inside the exchange’s interface is not money; a bitcoin balance inside the interface is not a crypto-asset in the customer’s actual control. Both are bookkeeping liabilities of the company whose solvency and operating model are, at this moment, under examination by the market, by regulators, and by prosecutors.
Income arises only when funds leave the exchange’s infrastructure — when złoty land in the customer’s bank account, or when crypto-assets reach a wallet under the customer’s exclusive control. Everything inside is, for income-tax purposes, transparent.
In evidentiary terms, this means that the customer should preserve the entire history of his account: transaction logs, balance exports, support correspondence, and confirmations of every withdrawal order placed. The burden, in any dispute with the tax authority, will fall on him to show that the figures on his screen do not correspond to a withdrawal. This documentary record is, for the taxpayer, what filed claims and confirmations of transfer are for the creditor in a bankruptcy proceeding.
Amending Past Returns: The Question Polish Doctrine Has Not Yet Asked
From all of the above flows a conclusion that, for many taxpayers, will carry financial consequences well beyond the immediate matter of zondacrypto.
Consider a taxpayer who, in 2022, bought bitcoin on zondacrypto for 50,000 złoty. In 2023, after the price had risen, he sold the bitcoin back into złoty — placing the order inside the exchange’s interface — and his account balance read 120,000 złoty. Acting in accordance with what was then the prevailing — and, as it turns out, mistaken — interpretation of the tax authorities, he reported the 70,000-złoty difference as income from the paid disposal of virtual currency on his PIT-38 return for 2023, and he paid the 19% tax: 13,300 złoty.
Not a single złoty had left his zondacrypto account. In 2026 — when the exchange stopped paying out — his balance is, technically, still there. Access to it is not. Whether and when access will return is unknown. From the economic point of view, he earned nothing.
On the correct reading of Article 11(1), and of Article 17(1)(11) and (1f), as confirmed by the case law cited above, this taxpayer realized no income whatever in 2023. The internal “sale” of bitcoin for złoty within the exchange’s interface was not a taxable event, because as a result of it the taxpayer received neither money nor monetary value within the meaning of the Act. He received only an entry in the exchange’s books — an entry that, in the realities of 2026, turns out to correspond to no payable disbursement.
This opens the way to amending the PIT-38 return for 2023 and to filing for a refund of overpayment under Article 75 § 1 of the Tax Ordinance. The five-year limitation period under Article 70 § 1 of the Tax Ordinance, in principle, makes such amendments available with respect to 2020 and subsequent years.
The argument, however, requires honest analytical rigor, because it is not self-evident. An opponent will argue — and the argument deserves serious engagement — that the internal sale of a crypto-asset for złoty is, in fact, an “exchange of virtual currency for legal tender” within the meaning of Article 17(1f), and that in the moment of that exchange, the taxpayer received złoty, even if only in the form of an exchange-account balance. There are two ways to answer this.
First, the definition of “exchange” in Article 17(1f) must be construed coherently with Article 11(1). “Exchange,” in tax law, is an event in which the taxpayer receives something — receives, in the cash-method sense, by incorporating it into his sphere of control. A ledger entry in a counterparty’s information system does not meet that test until the counterparty discharges its obligation. The Warsaw court, in III SA/Wa 179/24, said precisely this when it spoke of “real accretion” as the sine qua non of taxable income.
Second, in a situation of documented insolvency — and zondacrypto’s situation, though not yet declared a bankruptcy, has every factual hallmark of a liquidity crisis — it transpires ex post that the entry on the account never corresponded to any real accretion. The taxpayer should not be charged tax on a sum he never, in the economic sense, possessed and is unlikely ever to recover, or will recover only in materially reduced form through liquidation. This is the classical situation in which the cash method discharges its systemic protective function: it shields the taxpayer from being taxed on a fiction.
The evidentiary burden in such an amendment lies with the taxpayer. He should therefore have on hand — as set out in the preceding section — the complete documentation of his account history, his correspondence with the exchange, and his filings, if any, as an injured party in the criminal proceedings. Without such a record, the tax authority has every basis to question the amendment.
Polish doctrine has not yet engaged with this question, for a simple reason: before the zondacrypto crisis, the phenomenon had no scale. It does now. It is time for doctrine, and for the bodies applying the law, to make up the lost ground.
The Case for a General Interpretation by the Minister of Finance — and the Case for Issuing It Soon
Article 14a § 1(1) of the Polish Tax Ordinance authorizes the Minister of Finance to issue general interpretations “for the purpose of ensuring uniform application of tax law by tax and audit authorities, in particular in matters in which analogous facts or law have been resolved differently in individual interpretations.” The instrument is purpose-built for the situation now in front of us. (We set aside the related but narrower instrument of tax explanations under Article 14a § 1(2) — for matters of mass and systemic importance, a general interpretation is the more appropriate tool, because it speaks directly to the divergence among first-instance authorities.)
The situation is this. Tens of thousands — perhaps hundreds of thousands — of Polish taxpayers will, in the coming months, have to file their annual returns for 2025, in which they will be required to answer three questions:
- Whether the balances on their zondacrypto accounts as of 31 December 2025 — both the złoty balance and the cryptocurrency balances — must be reported as income.
- Whether transactions conducted inside zondacrypto in 2025, never followed by a withdrawal, must be reported as paid disposals of virtual currency.
- Whether they may amend their returns for 2020 through 2024 with respect to similar events on which they previously paid tax.
Without a clear position from the Minister of Finance, these questions will be answered by individual tax offices, each in its own way — and tax offices, it bears recalling, decide the tax in the first instance. Experience teaches that, in legally non-obvious cases, those answers will diverge. Some inspectors will accept the proposition that an unwithdrawn balance is not income; others will insist on the full nominal gain. Some will accept the amendment for prior years; others will deny the refund on the theory that “at the moment of the BTC-to-PLN sale, income arose.”
What follows is administrative and interpretive chaos, and after it, a wave of cases before the voivodeship administrative courts and the Supreme Administrative Court — cases that will, in due course, confirm the proposition advanced in this essay, but only after five, seven, sometimes ten years. In the meantime, taxpayers will bear the cost of proceedings, the fees of counsel, the burden of legal uncertainty, and, in some instances, the enforcement of liabilities that will eventually be found to have been groundless.
This is precisely the scenario for which Article 14a was designed. The Minister of Finance can, in a single interpretive act, prevent it. He need only confirm two propositions:
First, that income from the paid disposal of virtual currency, within the meaning of Article 17(1)(11) in connection with Article 17(1f) of the PIT Act, arises at the moment when the taxpayer actually receives, or has placed at his disposal — in the sense of Article 11(1) — funds (where the exchange is for legal tender), a good, a service, a property right, or when his obligation is in fact extinguished. A bookkeeping entry in the information system of an outside party — particularly an outside party that is failing to honor its obligations to its customers — does not satisfy this test.
Second, that taxpayers who, in earlier years, reported as income events that, on this proper reading, did not in fact generate income, are entitled to amend their returns and to file for a refund of overpayment under Article 75 § 1 of the Tax Ordinance.
The interpretation need not run long. Two or three pages would suffice. Its systemic importance — for taxpayers, for tax offices, for the predictability of the legal order — would be wholly disproportionate to the work required to produce it.
Counter-Arguments, and Replies
It is only fair to lay out the arguments that may be raised against the thesis of this essay.
First counter-argument. When the customer sells BTC for PLN on the exchange, the customer receives PLN — the PLN balance increases — and that is the moment of income within the meaning of Article 17(1f). Subsequent withdrawal difficulties are, from the tax-law point of view, secondary, and at most generate a loss within the meaning of Article 23 of the PIT Act, not the absence of income.
Reply. The argument is formally coherent but commits a category mistake. A PLN balance on an exchange interface is not “money the taxpayer received”; it is a bookkeeping entry recording the taxpayer’s claim against the exchange. The distinction is not pedantry. It is the foundational legal divide between res — a thing — and obligatio — a claim to a thing. Polish law has known this distinction since Roman times — for roughly two thousand years, that is. Article 11(1) of the PIT Act speaks of “money,” not “monetary claims.” A construction of income from claims would require its own statutory basis, which the legislature has not enacted.
As for the loss under Article 23: the opposing argument posits a structure in which income arises first, and a loss — in a separate event — neutralizes it. The construction is theoretically conceivable but practically unworkable. In the current system, a loss from the paid disposal of virtual currency is settled in a distinct regime: an excess of costs over revenues, carried forward under Article 22(16) of the PIT Act, the dedicated provision for crypto-asset cost recognition. Determining when the loss arose, in a situation of unfinished liquidation proceedings, is in practice impossible. And — this is the decisive point — taxing a fiction and then offsetting it with a constructed loss runs against the principle the Constitutional Tribunal has repeatedly affirmed: the principle of the taxpayer’s ability to pay as the foundation of income taxation. The customer has no real ability to pay tax on a balance that exists only in an exchange’s interface. To tax it is to tax a fiction.
Second counter-argument. Accepting this thesis would create a precedent in which any taxpayer could defer the moment of income by invoking “withdrawal difficulties” on the part of his counterparty.
Reply. It would not. It would create a precedent in which income arises when, and only when, the taxpayer actually receives money or has money actually placed at his disposal in the cash-method sense. That standard is already in the statute, in Article 11(1); the thesis of this essay is merely the consistent application of that standard to a new factual situation. A situation in which money sits in a bank account and the taxpayer can withdraw it whenever he wants does satisfy the “placed at disposal” criterion. A situation in which money is only a ledger entry in a counterparty’s system, and the counterparty does not execute withdrawal orders, does not.
Third counter-argument. Allowing amendments for prior years will deplete the budget and invite similar amendments in unrelated matters.
Reply. This is a fiscal-political argument, not a legal one. The state — through the Constitutional Tribunal, the Supreme Administrative Court, and the Tax Ordinance itself — operates a structure designed to protect the citizen against taxation beyond the statutory measure. Fiscal arguments do not override that structure. Furthermore, the scale of potential amendments is bounded — by the five-year limitation period and by the narrow factual situation to which the thesis applies (a balance on the account of an exchange whose solvency is in question, in the absence of an actual withdrawal). Other situations — bank-account income, gains on functioning exchanges, transactions completed by withdrawal — remain fully within the standard taxation regime.
Fourth counter-argument. The Voivodeship Administrative Court in Gdańsk, in its judgment of 15 April 2025, I SA/Gd 13/25, dismissed the taxpayer’s complaint and confirmed that the exchange of a virtual currency (DAI) for fiat generates income, regardless of the economic character of the transaction as a “returnable collateral.” Transposed to zondacrypto, this would imply that every internal BTC-to-PLN sale generates income.
Reply. The Gdańsk judgment must be read carefully, because at first glance it seems to cut against the thesis. The court’s holding, however, rests on a circumstance fundamentally different from the situation of a zondacrypto customer: in I SA/Gd 13/25, the applicant actually received the fiat currency. The court said as much, when it spoke of “the ability to dispose of fiat currency” as the condition of the gain’s permanence. The point in dispute was the taxpayer’s argument that the disposal was provisional — that DAI would, in due course, have to be returned to the CDP mechanism. The court rejected that argument with reason: once fiat had reached the taxpayer and the taxpayer could dispose of it — irrespective of any future intent to return it — the gain was, within the meaning of Article 11(1), real.
The zondacrypto customer’s situation is structurally different. He did not receive fiat. He received an entry on a screen, an entry that does not correspond to any disbursement and, in present circumstances, may never. The Gdańsk court’s emphasis on the actual ability to dispose of fiat, applied to the zondacrypto customer, points the opposite way: the customer has no such ability, because the fiat never arrived and cannot be made to arrive. The Gdańsk judgment, far from undermining the thesis of this essay, in fact reinforces it — by underscoring that what matters, for purposes of Article 11(1), is the actual receipt of disposable value. The zondacrypto customer manifestly does not have it.
Conclusion: A View from Some Distance
Madoff was arrested in December of 2008. The SIPC distributions, and the Justice Department’s parallel Madoff Victim Fund, continued for more than a decade after the pyramid’s collapse. Not every customer recovered the entirety of his losses. Those who, in the final years before the collapse, had withdrawn more than they had deposited, were subject — under the “good faith” test of American bankruptcy law, in clawback proceedings — to surrender a portion of what they had taken, on the ground that those withdrawals had come not from any real investment return but from the deposits of newer customers, returns that had never existed.
The Polish customer of zondacrypto reading these lines is at a stage substantially earlier than Madoff’s creditors were in 2009. His legal situation — including his tax situation — has not yet settled. This essay does not pretend to settle it; that is the work of the legislature, of the Minister of Finance, and of the courts. It does aspire to two things.
The first is to point out that the existing provisions — Article 11(1) and Article 17(1)(11) and (1f) of the PIT Act — already supply an unambiguous answer to whether a balance on the account of a non-paying exchange constitutes taxable income. The answer is that it does not. This requires no statutory change. It requires only the consistent application of the cash method, which the statute has contained for thirty-five years.
The second is an appeal for a prompt general interpretation by the Minister of Finance. We make this appeal not from the position of an advocate for one side of a dispute — though, from the standpoint of representing the affected zondacrypto customers, such an interpretation would be useful — but from the position of a participant in the legal order, who knows that uneven interpretation in matters of mass concern produces injustice, uncertainty, and, in the end, a loss of public trust in the state.
The Polish taxpayer who opens his app in the morning and sees a balance he cannot withdraw needs one thing from his state: a clear signal that what he is looking at is not yet income. That signal can be sent by the Minister of Finance in a single interpretive act. Representing such taxpayers, we urge that it be sent.
This text is an analytical commentary and does not substitute for individual legal advice. The tax characterization of any specific situation will turn on the particular facts — including the documentation of transactions, the account history, and the specifics of any withdrawal order — and may yield different conclusions in cases with atypical factual elements.
Kancelaria Prawna Skarbiec
Robert Nogacki – licensed legal counsel (radca prawny, WA-9026), Founder of Kancelaria Prawna Skarbiec.
There are lawyers who practice law. And there are those who deal with problems for which the law has no ready answer. For over twenty years, Kancelaria Skarbiec has worked at the intersection of tax law, corporate structures, and the deeply human reluctance to give the state more than the state is owed. We advise entrepreneurs from over a dozen countries – from those on the Forbes list to those whose bank account was just seized by the tax authority and who do not know what to do tomorrow morning.
One of the most frequently cited experts on tax law in Polish media – he writes for Rzeczpospolita, Dziennik Gazeta Prawna, and Parkiet not because it looks good on a résumé, but because certain things cannot be explained in a court filing and someone needs to say them out loud. Author of AI Decoding Satoshi Nakamoto: Artificial Intelligence on the Trail of Bitcoin’s Creator. Co-author of the award-winning book Bezpieczeństwo współczesnej firmy (Security of a Modern Company).
Kancelaria Skarbiec holds top positions in the tax law firm rankings of Dziennik Gazeta Prawna. Four-time winner of the European Medal, recipient of the title International Tax Planning Law Firm of the Year in Poland.
He specializes in tax disputes with fiscal authorities, international tax planning, crypto-asset regulation, and asset protection. Since 2006, he has led the WGI case – one of the longest-running criminal proceedings in the history of the Polish financial market – because there are things you do not leave half-done, even if they take two decades. He believes the law is too serious to be treated only seriously – and that the best legal advice is the kind that ensures the client never has to stand before a court.
