To his followers, Roger Ver is known as Bitcoin Jesus, a charismatic advocate of the cryptocurrency that is once again captivating investors with record-breaking gains. But to the Internal Revenue Service, Ver symbolizes a new target in the digital age: a crypto holder suspected of failing to pay taxes after selling tokens.
U.S. prosecutors charged Ver this year with evading more than $48 million in taxes for selling $240 million in tokens. It’s the most prominent case dealing solely with tax fraud and digital-asset sales, and marks a break from the tradition of prosecutors tacking tax charges onto crypto cases for crimes like money laundering, ransomware attacks and investor scams.
Ver, 45, is awaiting a Spanish judge’s decision on whether he must be extradited to America after his April arrest in Barcelona while attending a crypto conference. The U.S. expatriate spent a month in jail before getting out on bail and moving to Mallorca, where he’s received a steady stream of visitors. An outspoken critic of the U.S. government, he said he’s being persecuted by prosecutors.
Roger Ver, a U.S. expatriate, awaits a Spanish judge’s decision over whether he will be extradited to America to face tax fraud charges.
Anthony Kwan/Photographer: Anthony Kwan/Bloom
“They don’t like me, and they don’t like my political views, and they just came at me every which way,” Ver told Bloomberg News in an exclusive interview in late October.
Ver, a U.S. expatriate, awaits a Spanish judge’s decision over whether he will be extradited to America to face tax fraud charges.
Ver said the Justice Department has ignored evidence that helps his defense and refutes a central premise by prosecutors — that he intended to cheat the IRS. Rather, he said, he relied on professionals who advised him when IRS policy on taxing crypto sales was unsettled.
“I instructed all my tax attorneys and preparers, ‘We need to do everything perfectly because I don’t want any problem with the IRS at all,”‘ Ver said. “That was their instructions the whole time.”
A Justice Department representative declined to comment.
The seeds of Ver’s legal peril lay in his success as an early crypto investor — long before the latest Bitcoin rally fueled by Donald Trump’s U.S. presidential win. They center on his representations to the IRS and the agency’s reconstruction of his holdings.
Ver grew up in Silicon Valley, founding a computer company called MemoryDealers at the precocious age of 19. He also engaged in tax protests and ran for California’s legislature at 21 as a libertarian.
In 2001, he pleaded guilty to dealing explosives without a license. (Ver says he simply sold firecrackers on eBay.) He served 10 months in prison, which hardened his attitude toward the U.S. government. He left America in 2006, moving to Japan. He focused on building MemoryDealers and another firm, Agilestar, which sold optical transceivers.
Spreading the gospel
When crypto began, he embraced its promise for transferring wealth without government interference. He started buying Bitcoin in 2011 for less than $1, touting it at barbecues, parties and everywhere else. Intense and fast talking, he spread the vision of using crypto to buy a sandwich or even a car. When Bitcoin hit it big, Ver touted its potential from conference stages.
He co-founded Blockchain.com, a crypto company once valued at $14 billion, and was an early investor in payment processor BitPay and digital-asset firm Ripple. When the Bitcoin network underwent a software upgrade he opposed in 2017, Ver broke with the community, switching to a split-off called Bitcoin Cash. He said his current holdings include Bitcoin, Bitcoin Cash, Ether and Zeno.
Despite his notoriety, Ver decided in 2014 to renounce his U.S. citizenship, later becoming a citizen of St. Kitts and Nevis. U.S. citizens who expatriate and are worth more than $2 million must report their worldwide assets to the IRS, and pay an exit tax based on their asset sales.
As he planned to expatriate, prosecutors allege, Ver hid the number and value of Bitcoin he owned and controlled personally and through MemoryDealers and Agilestar, his California-based companies.
The IRS used blockchain analysis to determine that by early 2014, Ver and his companies owned about 131,000 Bitcoin trading between $782 and $960, according to the indictment — more than he reported in tax filings. He’s accused of tax evasion, wire fraud, and filing a false tax return.
Ver worked with a law firm and appraisers on the exit tax, but gave them false or misleading information about his Bitcoin holdings, and an exit tax return filed in 2016 failed to report the Bitcoin he owned personally and underreported the value of his companies, prosecutors charge.
The indictment also alleges Ver “fraudulently misrepresented and concealed” from the IRS the crypto that his companies sold in 2017 for about $240 million.
Ver disputes this characterization, but declined to discuss the indictment further or elaborate on his crypto holdings with Bloomberg.
A website, freerogernow.org, is linked to Ver’s personal website and encourages supporters to sign an open letter calling on the U.S. government to end his “unjust prosecution.” It adds some details about his investigation, including claims that IRS agents interrogated his tax lawyer in 2018 without a warrant and that litigation ensued about communications with his lawyers.
In 2022, the U.S. Supreme Court took up a case that didn’t name the parties but matched Ver’s circumstances. The court dropped that case in 2023 without issuing a ruling.
If he’s extradited, Ver’s case would be the first to go to trial on crypto-only tax charges. In February, a Texas man, Frank Ahlgren, was accused of underreporting capital gains from selling $3.7 million in Bitcoin. Ahlgren pleaded guilty in September.
Ver, who has more than 700,000 followers on X, spent years under IRS investigation as he traveled the world. In 2021, he posted a satirical video titled “Taxation is Theft.”
Ver was indicted Feb. 15 under court seal but didn’t learn about it until weeks later, when he was at the Privacy Guardians conference in Barcelona. His book, Hijacking Bitcoin: The Hidden History of BTC, had just gone on sale. A police officer approached him in the lobby of the W Hotel, asked him to confirm his identity, and said he had an Interpol arrest warrant for him.
“The bottom kind of fell out of my stomach and I was like, ‘Oh, my God, the U.S. is going to do this to me again,”‘ Ver said.
Back to jail
With his arrest, Ver returned to prison, this time to a two-man cell in Spain. Some inmates incorrectly assumed he was an American spy or undercover cop, he said.
“I didn’t tell anybody in there who I was because I didn’t want to get extorted or have any sort of problems with anybody,” Ver said.
Spain has been a close ally of the U.S. in extradition cases. This year, Spain sent Douglas Edelman, a former defense contractor, to face U.S. charges that he evaded taxes on more than $350 million in income. He’s pleaded not guilty and denies the charges.
Ver said he’s spending his days in Mallorca talking to his lawyers on Zoom, practicing Brazilian jiujitsu and entertaining friends visiting from overseas. He’s attended Bitcoin meetups, where he said he was well received.
Ver appeared in an HBO documentary about the origins of Bitcoin. A sparring partner from jiujitsu said he’s seen him in the show.
“I said, ‘Please, if you don’t mind, don’t mention that to anybody else.’ He said, ‘Sure, no problem.’ But he had kind of a sly grin when he said that to me.”
The International Auditing and Assurance Standards Board is proposing to tailor some of its standards to align with recent additions to the International Ethics Standards Board for Accountants’ International Code of Ethics for Professional Accountants when it comes to using the work of an external expert.
The IAASB is asking for comments via a digital response template that can be found on the IAASB website by July 24, 2025.
In December 2023, the IESBA approved an exposure draft for proposed revisions to the IESBA’s Code of Ethics related to using the work of an external expert. The proposals included three new sections to the Code of Ethics, including provisions for professional accountants in public practice; professional accountants in business and sustainability assurance practitioners. The IESBA approved the provisions on using the work of an external expert at its December 2024 meeting, establishing an ethical framework to guide accountants and sustainability assurance practitioners in evaluating whether an external expert has the necessary competence, capabilities and objectivity to use their work, as well as provisions on applying the Ethics Code’s conceptual framework when using the work of an outside expert.
President Donald Trump’s tariffs would effectively cause a tax increase for low-income families that is more than three times higher than what wealthier Americans would pay, according to an analysis from the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy.
The report from the progressive think tank outlined the outcomes for Americans of all backgrounds if the tariffs currently in effect remain in place next year. Those making $28,600 or less would have to spend 6.2% more of their income due to higher prices, while the richest Americans with income of at least $914,900 are expected to spend 1.7% more. Middle-income families making between $55,100 and $94,100 would pay 5% more of their earnings.
Trump has imposed the steepest U.S. duties in more than a century, including a 145% tariff on many products from China, a 25% rate on most imports from Canada and Mexico, duties on some sectors such as steel and aluminum and a baseline 10% tariff on the rest of the country’s trading partners. He suspended higher, customized tariffs on most countries for 90 days.
Economists have warned that costs from tariff increases would ultimately be passed on to U.S. consumers. And while prices will rise for everyone, lower-income families are expected to lose a larger portion of their budgets because they tend to spend more of their earnings on goods, including food and other necessities, compared to wealthier individuals.
Food prices could rise by 2.6% in the short run due to tariffs, according to an estimate from the Yale Budget Lab. Among all goods impacted, consumers are expected to face the steepest price hikes for clothing at 64%, the report showed.
The Yale Budget Lab projected that the tariffs would result in a loss of $4,700 a year on average for American households.
Artificial intelligence is just getting started in the accounting world, but it is already helping firms like technology specialist Schellman do more things with fewer people, allowing the firm to scale back hiring and reduce headcount in certain areas through natural attrition.
Schellman CEO Avani Desai said there have definitely been some shifts in headcount at the Top 100 Firm, though she stressed it was nothing dramatic, as it mostly reflects natural attrition combined with being more selective with hiring. She said the firm has already made an internal decision to not reduce headcount in force, as that just indicates they didn’t hire properly the first time.
“It hasn’t been about reducing roles but evolving how we do work, so there wasn’t one specific date where we ‘started’ the reduction. It’s been more case by case. We’ve held back on refilling certain roles when we saw opportunities to streamline, especially with the use of new technologies like AI,” she said.
One area where the firm has found such opportunities has been in the testing of certain cybersecurity controls, particularly within the SOC framework. The firm examined all the controls it tests on the service side and asked which ones require human judgment or deep expertise. The answer was a lot of them. But for the ones that don’t, AI algorithms have been able to significantly lighten the load.
“[If] we don’t refill a role, it’s because the need actually has changed, or the process has improved so significantly [that] the workload is lighter or shared across the smarter system. So that’s what’s happening,” said Desai.
Outside of client services like SOC control testing and reporting, the firm has found efficiencies in administrative functions as well as certain internal operational processes. On the latter point, Desai noted that Schellman’s engineers, including the chief information officer, have been using AI to help develop code, which means they’re not relying as much on outside expertise on the internal service delivery side of things. There are still people in the development process, but their roles are changing: They’re writing less code, and doing more reviewing of code before it gets pushed into production, saving time and creating efficiencies.
“The best way for me to say this is, to us, this has been intentional. We paused hiring in a few areas where we saw overlaps, where technology was really working,” said Desai.
However, even in an age awash with AI, Schellman acknowledges there are certain jobs that need a human, at least for now. For example, the firm does assessments for the FedRAMP program, which is needed for cloud service providers to contract with certain government agencies. These assessments, even in the most stable of times, can be long and complex engagements, to say nothing of the less predictable nature of the current government. As such, it does not make as much sense to reduce human staff in this area.
“The way it is right now for us to do FedRAMP engagements, it’s a very manual process. There’s a lot of back and forth between us and a third party, the government, and we don’t see a lot of overall application or technology help… We’re in the federal space and you can imagine, [with] what’s going on right now, there’s a big changing market condition for clients and their pricing pressure,” said Desai.
As Schellman reduces staff levels in some places, it is increasing them in others. Desai said the firm is actively hiring in certain areas. In particular, it’s adding staff in technical cybersecurity (e.g., penetration testers), the aforementioned FedRAMP engagements, AI assessment (in line with recently becoming an ISO 42001 certification body) and in some client-facing roles like marketing and sales.
“So, to me, this isn’t about doing more with less … It’s about doing more of the right things with the right people,” said Desai.
While these moves have resulted in savings, she said that was never really the point, so whatever the firm has saved from staffing efficiencies it has reinvested in its tech stack to build its service line further. When asked for an example, she said the firm would like to focus more on penetration testing by building a SaaS tool for it. While Schellman has a proof of concept developed, she noted it would take a lot of money and time to deploy a full solution — both of which the firm now has more of because of its efficiency moves.
“What is the ‘why’ behind these decisions? The ‘why’ for us isn’t what I think you traditionally see, which is ‘We need to get profitability high. We need to have less people do more things.’ That’s not what it is like,” said Desai. “I want to be able to focus on quality. And the only way I think I can focus on quality is if my people are not focusing on things that don’t matter … I feel like I’m in a much better place because the smart people that I’ve hired are working on the riskiest and most complicated things.”