I have AT&T stock from 1988 and I'm not sure how to calculate the cost basis for it and all of the other stocks I received as a result of owning AT&T stock.

[DanK2]

The stock split twice(93' and 98'). Then were a number of things that have happened since which produced stocks in various other companies such as Verizon, Comcast, CenturyLink(via merger with Qwest), Frontier Communications and Vodafone. All the stock was sold in 2015 with the exception of some DRIP stock in Comcast. Do I need to go through the craziness of figuring out the cost basis for each and every stock through all of the transactions or is the cost basis of the original AT&T stock all I need?

If I need to figure out the cost basis for each stock how do I go about doing that?

[DanK2]

Doing more digging and it is just getting more complex. When AT&T broke apart 1/10 of a share of US West was given to AT&T stock holders. 1986 2-for-1 stock split of US West. 1990 another 2-for-1 split. Between 1995-1998 there was a split-off and division I'm not sure i understand. US West(new) merged with Qwest in 2000 and my CenturyLink stock came from its merger with Qwest in 2011. Now what the heck do you do with the cost basis there?

[Opus 17]

Duplicate. Consolidate follow up here https://ttlc.intuit.com/questions/3392373-i-was-gifted-stock-from-my-father-that-was-gifted-to-him-b...

[Hal_Al]

You have to report the sale on your tax return. Lacking any cost basis, the IRS will consider the entire sale amount as taxable. So, you need to make your best effort to determine the original cost basis, even if (worst case) it's a guess. Historical prices of publicly traded stocks are  readily available on the internet and should, at least, satisfy the IRS that your basis wasn't zero; just "google" “Historical Stock Prices". I use http://bigcharts.marketwatch.com/historical/

Stockholder relations dept at AT&T may be able to help.

I’ve heard there is a place called Netbasis.com , that will provide your cost basis for a fee, but I cannot vouch for them.

[DanK2]

No problem reporting the sale. I have all of that info including the cost basis for for DRIPs. It's the old stock that is the issue I can certainly get historical prices. That is pretty easy if we were talking about stock purchases but all of the stocks listed above, with the exception of AT&T, came about from non-stock purchases. From what I have read on calculating cost basis for those events there is some sort of partitioning of cost basis based on numbers of shares and, as you can see with US West, there are sometimes a number of events in between the initial stock purchase and the sale. That's where I am ultimately stuck. All sales go into TurboTax individually but the cost basis is a mystery to me because the stock was not purchased. Make sense?