Coinbase support seems questionable

Forum|Forum|4 years ago
February 6, 2022
1 reply
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According to my Gain/Loss Report, I have a roughly $3300 loss from crypto on Coinbase last year.

First - I decided to go into Coinbase and download the CSV designated as being for TurboTax use. I imported it into TurboTax. The site told me it imported fine, and my tax due went UP by about $3000. Considering I had a $3300 loss, this was obviously wrong.

Second - I tried to directly import from Coinbase by having TurboTax login to my Coinbase account and pull the data out. It did so successfully. My tax owed dropped about $300. But MANY entries are marked with orange as NEED REVIEW. Those entries are all lacking a Cost Basis. I still feel like I am not getting credit for many losses on trades. If the cost basis is showing $0 and it's a sale, that makes it look like I earned a nice return, when in reality it was a loss.

Not sure if this is all a Coinbase problem or a TurboTax problem but this has me questioning other imports I did from other sources.

TurboTax Premier Online

JohnB5677

Level 15

You have correctly identified the issue. This is not unique to Coinbase. It appears with stocks, bonds and other crypto tracking software. If you do not have the correct basis (price you paid for it), you could show a substantial gain when it may have been a loss, or a lesser gain.

You will have to go through each record and correct the entries.

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bxd76Author

Level 2

Thank you for affirming the issue.

How do day traders handle this situation? With thousands of transactions per year how can they possibly be expected to manually correct every cost basis? I only have two pages of transactions but I’m not sure how to untangle the spaghetti.

While I don’t see this as a TurboTax error, it behooves Intuit to apply pressure and resources to Coinbase, to get this issue corrected on their end. I will never use Coinbase again, and TurboTax shouldn’t promote an import function if knowingly the import is errant.

Do we know which crypto exchanges properly document cost basis and fully integrate with TurboTax? At the least, Intuit could publish a preferred-partners list.

Thank you.