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Unfortunately financial institutions won't always have the acquisition info about securities you sell. If you know what you paid for the shares that were sold, you should just enter that amount*. If you don't know what you paid, but you know that they were purchased and when they were purchased, you can generally look up historic stock values and use that to determine what you paid. If you don't know any of that, then you'll generally just have to use any info you can to estimate when they would have been purchased, and conservatively estimate what you paid using the lowest market value in that time range.
*If the stock is "covered" stock, then you should report a cost basis of $0, then indicate you have "additional info" and use the "corrected cost basis" field to enter what you've determined as the cost basis. This is unlikely because typically institutions will know the cost basis for "covered" assets, and if not they will report $0. Also, if shares have split, or there have been mergers with other companies, it's possible you may need to adjust the original purchase price to account for these activities. Most historical price sites will show you a "split-adjusted" price on historical dates that account for share splits, so those are easy to account for. Other activities like mergers can be more difficult to account for, so hopefully that doesn't apply in this case.
I have a similar worry. Broker 1099B says basis is "missing". It's entirely clear that the basis is identical to the sale price, but reported as "missing". When I enter the correct amount, will some IRS computer flag this as an error? Dealing with IRS errors in the past has been a nightmare.
No, the IRS will not flag your entry of a different cost basis if it is entered properly.
If it is blank, leave it blank. (This will match the 1099-B posting)
Thanks. Actually, I was not entering the data from a 1099B but downloading that 1099B from Schwab into Turbotax.
What I have done is to locate the specific short term sale in what Turbotax downloaded, changed the basis from 0 to the correct amount, then answered a few other questions in Turbotax about the transaction, all of which were "no". Later, when Turbotax runs a review I will see if it complains. Meanwhile I am still trying to get the Broker to amend the 1099B.
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