I post a summary every three months or so because Intuit know about this issue and haven't fixed it. They know about it because various posters have complained to Intuit customer support and been told it's for their own good (even though, if they buy a Mac, they don't deserve the same motherly care, as I previously posted).
So there is no fix to downloading brokerage accounts on Windows. But there is a perfectly workable work-round; AutoHotKey. It is a simple Windows app, now available on the Windows Store (which should reassure anyone out there concerned about security) which is able to type stuff into other Windows apps. It's not a solution of itself - you need to write a little script, a file to drive it, which associates a single key press with the action of taking whatever is on the clipboard and typing it into wherever Windows is typing stuff. There are various versions of the script in this thread.
The fix works everywhere, although it no longer seems to be required in Quicken, an ex-Intuit app that I use. I wonder why?
The alternative to this, an alternative that may be better, is do not download your Brokerage account. This works because some years ago the Federal Government required brokerage firms to give all the information the IRS required to the IRS... There was a transition period during which brokerage firms could deny knowing the cost basis of shares we sell; it was lame because clearly they did know for the cases that affected me, but it still happens if you transfer shares between different brokerage companies. Nevertheless you still don't have to file individual transactions, as TurboTax does if you make the mistake of downloading a brokerage account, only the totals.
Downloading a brokerage account basically puts TurboTax into show-all tell-all mode; every single transaction is written into your tax return. That's 17 extra pages in my 2020 tax return; guess what, I won't be downloading my brokerage data to TurboTax in 201, even if I use TurboTax...
If you use TurboTax (I assume that's why you are reading this) you can skip the download and just follow the instructions to enter the summaries of the data, which your brokerage firm gives you. If you have transactions where the firm really doesn't have the cost basis you are going to have to find that anyway. I don't have any, so I don't know what TurboTax does. It wouldn't surprise me if it just set the basis to 0 - think about that.
