As advised here by members of the Community, I wrote a detailed letter to the insurance company noting everything that had occurred, including my telephone conversations with their representatives. The letter started and ended with the following request:
"I am requesting a Corrected Form 1099-R and/or your substantiation that an original erroneous Form 1099-R has not been and will not be sent to the IRS or the [state] Department of Revenue."
This letter crossed in the mail (in early March) with the new, "corrected" 1099-R that the phone representative had obtained for me and emailed to me in late February. It was (as expected) the same as what I had received by email. It is identical to the original (erroneous) 1099-R save that the three Boxes that had previously shown dollar-denominated distributions -- Boxes 1, 2a and 16 -- are now blank. Unfortunately, the Corrected box is not checked, and Boxes 7 and 15 are still populated, the former with (ugh) 4D (Death, annuity payments that may be subject to payment).
Although the Corrected box was not checked, there was an accompanying page with the following statement:
"IMPORTANT INFORMATION
"You recently received a Form 1099 for distributions made from your annuity policy in 2021.
"Some of the information on that form was incorrect. Enclosed is a corrected Form 1099.
"Please destroy the original 1099 that you received and replace it with this 1099 for tax filing purposes."
Setting aside for a moment the fact that 2021 should read "2022" -- as I noted in earlier comments, this company tends to make a lot of unforced errors" -- I found this statement intriguing, especially in light of some of the earlier advice that had educated me on if and when the company is likely to pass 1099-R information on to the IRS.
So yesterday, which marked four weeks since their tax department had received my letter (I sent it by certified mail), I fought through the phone prompts and lengthy holds and spoke with someone who, again, actually seemed to understand what I was asking. In particular, I asked them whether and when they were going to issue the form with the Corrected box checked. This representative said that they only issue such Corrected forms for 1099s that have been corrected after the mid-April tax deadline, which is when they (the insurance company) send in their 1099-R files. This accords with what another representative had told me in February, although I do take note of the advice reply above that says that the real deadline was end of March. But, this internally consistent response, coupled with that page telling me to "[p]lease destroy [!] the original 1099 that you received" gives me more hope that the erroneous Form 1099 as originally issued will never make its way to the IRS. Which leads to the following two questions:
1) Is there any real advantage at this point to getting an extension? It sounds as though by July or August I would be able to check my transcript at irs.gov to be sure that the erroneous Form never went in. Then if by some chance it did, I could then dog the insurance company to re-issue a Form 1099 that is marked Corrected. Arguing against doing so is that I really would like to file on time; the evidence is that they are not going to have reported the erroneous income; and that even if they did, I would still be in the position of needing to request a properly Corrected-checked Form 1099 in late Summer.
2) If I do file now, do I just ignore the new, amounts-blank (hence implicitly $0) form that I have on hand? It sounds as though that one is going to be sent to the IRS. The comments I have received suggest that it is not necessary to report this; and yet I wonder whether it will be asking for trouble with the IRS to ignore it, especially if it turns out that the erroneous Form 1099 somehow makes its way to them.
