@mwltatg wrote:
Thanks for the information. However, this is not what I was hoping for. It's an impossible task to list every reinvested share's cost for tax filing. It's amounted to at least 360 (30 x 12) transactions for just this stock.
Remember that only dividends that you pay income tax on will increase the cost basis if you use them to buy more shares. If you were in a dividend reinvestment plan where you did not pay income tax on the dividends, then they don't increase your basis.
If you did pay income tax, then you can use the 1099-DIV forms you received over the years to calculate your basis, as long as all the dividends were reinvested. In other words, if your basis was $10,000, and you received $500 in dividends reported on a 1099-DIV as taxable income, and you know it was reinvested, you can assume your new basis is $10,500, even though you don't know the basis of any specific share.
Do you want to cash out entirely or only sell a portion? It would be tricky to calculate if you were trying to do FIFO or LIFO method. However, you can still get the taxable dividend from your 1099-DIV and the average stock price for the year.
Bottom line, if you are audited, the IRS does not have to allow any basis you can't prove.
