I had the same problem with E*Trade for Greyscale, and Aberdeen. Heres what I found out: The money is a distribution but it's not interest and it's not a dividend since these securities are shares of a Trust. It's more like a payoff or a way of sharing profits. Trusts dont issue K-1's so they just sort of give you a capital gain distribution. The problem is (from a taxpayer pov, there are lots of tiny distributions.
The main problems are they don't have a date acquired and a price. Greyescale conveniently didnt give us the date of aquisition, or a price. The price should be 0.00 and the date of aquisition is for lack of a better option the same date as the distribution itself.
Now for the tedious part. The way to fix it is to edit each line entry on the 1099-B itself, they are flagged with a red icon that says needs review. I had about 20 or so of these 'transactions" to deal with. the dialog method of updating the cost basis to 0 and the date of aquisition to the date of disposal was probably a minute per item. 20 minutes, of "Severence"- Mind-dumbing data entry. Hopefully there is a better way. Luckily I don't have 100 pages of these pesky transactions and in my case, they come to less than $70 The tax I have to pay on this distribution is next to nothing in the big picture. It's just annoying that we have to deal with this. I would not hold any of these Trusts in a taxable brokerage account to avoid this headache the year after next.... IRS if you are listening, please don't audit someone over this stupid glitch. Make them either provide the correct data thats missing or ignore it.
