I spoke to Vanguard this morning. The retirement specialist that I spoke to told me that since 2 of the 3 Prudential IRA distributions were taken on the same day, the IRS will consider those as one distribution as they aggregate all my IRAs into a single IRA. That's the good news. The bad news is that the only thing Vanguard can do is return the 3rd distribution to my brokerage account as an excess contribution, but that would be taxed again (it will already be taxed as a distribution from my Prudential annuity IRA). Vanguard suggested I contact a tax advisor to see if the IRS will allow the third distribution as a rollover since it was taken only 5 days before the other two distributions. I will try to do that but if the cost and hassle of trying to resolve this in advance with the IRS is significant, I may just bite the bullet and pay the additional tax (roughly $8K) on the returned contribution.
Lesson learned, only do direct ROTH conversions.
