7 Questions to Ask Before Hiring a Crypto Tax Accountant
Sam's List Editorial | 2026-06-06
7 Questions to Ask Before Hiring a Crypto Tax Accountant Crypto taxes are complicated enough that most general practitioners shouldn't be doing them. If you're figuring out how to hire a crypto tax accountant, know this: "I do crypto taxes" has become a marketing claim that doesn't actually tell you whether the person filing your return understands DeFi protocol accounting, staking income treatment, or what happens when the IRS sends a letter. The IRS isn't treating this as a niche anymore. The digital asset question sits at the vetted of Form 1040, right under your name — every filer answers it under penalty of perjury. Before you hand over your wallet addresses and exchange CSVs, ask these seven questions. The answers will tell you quickly whether you're talking to someone who can actually help — or someone who's going to click through software and hope for a vetted. 1. Do you have experience with DeFi, not just exchange trading? Exchange trading is the easy case. You buy ETH on Coinbase, you sell it, you have a gain or loss. Most CPAs who claim crypto experience have handled this. DeFi is something else entirely. Liquidity pool entries and exits, impermanent loss calculations, cross-chain bridge transactions, wrapped token conversions, yield farming rewards — these don't generate clean 1099s. They require the preparer to understand the underlying protocol mechanics well enough to determine what taxable event occurred and when. A CPA who has only worked with exchange transactions will approach a DeFi tax return the same way they approach a simple crypto return — and miss an enormous amount of complexity. Ask specifically: "Have you filed returns for clients who were active in liquidity pools or used cross-chain bridges?" If they can't give you a specific, grounded answer, you have your answer. 2. What software do you use to aggregate transaction data? The right answer names a real tool: Koinly, CoinTracker, TaxBit, TokenTax — and ideally mentions that they connect it to exchange CSVs and individual wallet addresses, not just exchange API feeds. Any of these platforms can handle hundreds of thousands of transactions and track cost basis across wallets and exchanges. They're not well-suited — DeFi transactions still require manual review and classification — but they're the baseline infrastructure for anyone doing this at scale. "I have a spreadsheet" is a red flag for anyone with more than 200 transactions. It's not that spreadsheets are inherently wrong — it's that building and maintaining a manual crypto transaction tracker for a client with years of...
