On the on demand tax guidance it states "Enter the lower of these two stock prices: the price on the first day of your offering period and the price on the date your stock was purchased, minus your ESPP discount." What does this mean?
There are two prices possibly involved in calculating this cost. You take the price at the beginning of the offer period and compare it to the price u actually paid. You use the lower of those two numbers. From that you subtract the discount in the plan, usually something like 15% of whichever of the twp prices was lower. Your company usually provides a sheet showing all these amounts for you. Maybe it's still on their website if you don't have the paper. It's confusing to do this without that data from the company and pretty simple if you have that information.
There are two prices possibly involved in calculating this cost. You take the price at the beginning of the offer period and compare it to the price u actually paid. You use the lower of those two numbers. From that you subtract the discount in the plan, usually something like 15% of whichever of the twp prices was lower. Your company usually provides a sheet showing all these amounts for you. Maybe it's still on their website if you don't have the paper. It's confusing to do this without that data from the company and pretty simple if you have that information.
This answer provided the necessary clarification as to the meaning of the statement in question. But my confusion was due to the fact that the data I received from the ESPP account was in a format that could have been directly inputted into TurboTax without resorting to an algorithm, if such an input format had been available in TurboTax. The 1099-B supplemental data I received provided precise dollar amounts for each lot of shares as to proceeds (on date of sale), cost basis, gain/loss, and ordinary income portion. Because of the nature of the questions asked by TurboTax, I had to dig up data from multiple sources going back nearly two decades to fill in the blanks when the data I really needed was right in front of me. No wonder I was confused.