How do I enter 1099-B financials if my financial institution did not show box b? The term is undetermined, but turbo tax requires this info to proceed.

[ljdelaurentis]

* 5 transactions - undetermined term transactions, non covered tax lots, date acquired N/A, with cost basis not provided to IRS,

[DianeW777]

Enter your transactions based on the data you have for purchase price and date acquired.  You are allowed to use 'Various' as the date acquired by selecting 'Something other than a date' when you are entering your 1099-B transactions or editing them.

The financial institutions were not always required to keep track of your cost basis.  Likewise they were not required to retain your date of purchase. If you moved your investments from one financial agent to another the new agent would not have historical data.

Noncovered simply means the financial institution does not have the long or short term data or the cost basis.  You will select the holding period based on the time you held the investments.  

1. Long term: held more than one year (one year plus one day) 
2. Short term: held one year or less

As far as cost basis, you must determine the amount you paid for the investment, also include reinvested dividends if this happened with these investments.

Enter the information in TurboTax by using the steps below. 

Open your TurboTax Online return:

1. Select Tax Home on the left panel > Select any Income category or Pick up where you left off
2. Select Tax Tools > Tools > Select Topic Search > Type 1099b  > Select GO (should be landed on 1099b)
3. Select Add Investments if your 1099-B is not yet present in your list
4. Continue to follow the prompts to enter the information yourself

Open your return in TurboTax Desktop:

1. Select Personal Income > Scroll to Investment Income > Select Stocks Cryptocurrency, Mutual Funds, Bonds, Other
2. Start or Update > Continue to follow the prompts to enter your 1099-B details

The sale of any investment is required to be included with your tax return, gain or loss.  Information from the link below may be helpful

• What is Form 1099-B: Proceeds from Broker Transactions? 

[ljdelaurentis]

Thanks for your response. On my composite tax forms, all transactions except these 5 show that VARIOUS should be used for date acquired. These 5 show N/A. Are you saying that I should use various for those as well? My current financial institution acquired my previous one where these purchases would have been executed. I don't see why they would not have this information. One transaction was itemized in 1099-B (via import) while the composite form only showed a total and indicated that the total included multiple transactions. This makes it difficult to verify in turbo tax except the transaction ID matches.

[RobertB4444]

Yes, you will need to change the date acquired to 'various'.  TurboTax does not recognize NA as a date replacement.

As to why your financial institution is using NA instead of dates that they have available that is a good question.  It should be posed to them.

@ljdelaurentis