Hi!
First and foremost, apologies for the headache that reading this might cause. I'm currently trying to work my head around what does and does not count as constructive receipt when it comes to receiving crypto-assets as part of an employment contract under UK law. Specifically my question is in the context of determining how much and when income tax would need to be paid. I can't find anything in the cryptoasset manual detailing constructive receipt of crypto assets and would appreciate being pointed in the correct direction!
Essentially, as part of my contract with my employer, I receive somewhere in the ballpark of about 2,000 tokens per month, with the token price fluctuating anywhere between $0.4 and $1. If these were going straight into my wallet, it would be as simple as paying the proportionate income tax upon receipt, and then if / when I convert those tokens to GBP I would be liable for capital gains if for instance I'd received at $0.4 but converted when at $1.
They do not go straight into my wallet however. Instead my 2,000 tokens per month are within a year-long vesting contract, and whilst there, I do not have use over them. They're a governance token (and nothing else, I don't get benefits from vesting etc.), and whilst held within the contract, they do not contribute to my voting power. Hence I would assume I do not have full rights over them - nor constructive receipt - and so would not pay income tax until they are released from the vesting contract into my wallet.
The complication occurs in that I have found out that they are on a linear unvesting schedule. They 'unlock' over the course of a year, meaning each month I can choose to release 1/12th of the tokens into my wallet. It's actually finer-grained than that; it updates every millisecond, but you get the picture! I could, technically, have chosen to release / take them out and put them into my wallet, which would've then granted me their proportionate voting power. So by some interpretations, as soon as they become available for release, I would be liable to pay income tax - as whilst I don't yet have the rights they bestow, I do have control over where they are.
Now I say technically here, as my employer did not immediately provide me the web link to control the contracts until I asked many months into the arrangement, and I was not aware up until that point that I could've been extracting them myself.
Ordinarily being unaware of your tax liabilities is not an excuse to simply not pay them! But if one is expected to pay tax on vested tokens that one has the power to release and yet are not aware of this power, this opens up a really odd edge case where a bad actor could maliciously assign a vesting contract to someone's wallet containing $2m of a token from a pump-and-dump scheme, and lump the unsuspecting victim with an enormous income tax. Not saying that's what has happened here, only that it's clear I don't have a solid grasp on what is and is not taxable income when it comes to vesting schedules and contracts.
In any case, I'd like to understand more about the HMRC's approach concerning whether or not a token that is not yet in your wallet (but critically you do have some limited control over) is an asset that income tax must be paid on. From the mumblings I've seen online, it appears to be that so long as you don't have the full rights of the token, you don't pay income tax on it? I.e. so long as I do not touch it, release it, or move it at all, this governance token is not something I am liable to pay income tax on until it's in my wallet and contributes to my governance powers? Which is merciful, since trying to figure out at what point I pay income tax on tokens that unlock by the millisecond would be somewhat of a nightmare, hehe
Thank you; all clarity and guidance to relevant part of the docs will be greatly appreciated!
