Box 1e of 1099B is "unknown". TurboTax doesn't let me enter unknown

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February 12, 2022
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ColeenD3

Level 15

You need to enter a date which can determine if it is long term or short term. If you can't supply a date, it is considered to be short term.

Please see this answer from KittyM.

You will enter unknown term gains or losses in the 1099-B interview along with your other stock transactions, but you will need to provide the missing purchase date or manually choose long-term or short term transaction. When it comes to the date acquired, your 1099-B can still be useful (even though it left this area blank). As long as each sale was listed as either short-term or long-term, you can type in the word "Various" in the box for date acquired.

When you enter or edit the specific transaction and do not include a purchase date, you will see the page Tell us about your no purchase date 1099-B. Your 1099-B likely reports this as a Box X transaction, so select that option next to Sale Category.

This will open another menu where you can choose the long-term (over a year) or short-term (less than a year) option. If you don't know how long you've had it, the transaction is automatically considered short-term.

dmertz

Level 15

If you know which shares were sold short-term and which were sold long-term even though you do not know the actual dates or were purchased on multiple dates, split the Form 1099-B into two with one that has the short-term shares and the other that has the long-term shares, then indicate Various for the purchase date (or the actual date if known).

In most cases, shares for which the brokerage reports that the purchase date as Unknown will be a long-term sale due to the brokerage generally being required to track the basis on stock shares purchased after 2010 and after 2011 on mutual fund shares. However, if shares were distributed in-kind from a retirement plan (which may be the case here since this question was posted in the Retirement section of this forum), the brokerage will likely report these as uncovered shares and, except in the case of NUA shares, the purchase date on these the purchase date is considered to be the date of distribution from the retirement account and the cost basis will be generally be the value on the date of distribution. If such a distribution from a retirement account was less than a year prior to the date of the sale, the shares were short-term. If you inherited the shares, the shares are considered to be long-term.

In most cases you should be able to figure out which the shares were short-term (those not held for more than one year), with the rest being long-term.