I sold several shares of stock in a company that I purchased through a direct stock purchase program over a number of years. My stock brokerage account has been sold and purchased multiple times resulting in the fact that my current brokerage does not have the original transaction confirmations or the historical information from the previous brokerages.
I have already tried calling the brokerages and I am out of luck, they have nothing. I saved my original receipts but they are in long term storage and I cannot access them in time for the April 17 deadline, and filing an extension is not an option.
In this case, how do I determine the cost basis of the shares I sold in order to determine Capital Gain/Loss?
Are there IRS approved of methods that I could try?
Thank you very much.
You may find these tips useful:
If you know when the stock was purchased, here are some tips:
To be sure, for older stock, even this can be a challenge. Still, if you can come up with a date of purchase, or at least a real good estimate, you can use resources, and even the broker, to determine what the purchase price of the stock was to determine basis. (If you inherited the stock, you need the value of the stock on the date the person you inherited it from passed). A broker can give you the stock's history: when it may have split, etc., that can help to determine the true cost basis of the stock.
The effort is worth it, however, because if you don't come up with a basis, the IRS will determine your basis is zero. That would mean that the sales price of the stock would be your gain, and that your entire "gain" would be taxable.
This website had a few additional suggestions for how to determine the cost basis you might find interesting: How to Find Unknown Cost Basis of Bonds & Stocks | Finance - Zacks
If you do not have the original transaction confirmation, the next best thing is to make an educated guess on the cost basis of shares sold. The IRS will presume that your cost basis is zero. As a tax consequence, the sales proceeds of your shares would be reported as a capital gain. I would highly recommend to do a little research to figure out the cost basis of the shares sold. It could potentially save you a lot in taxes.
You can go to the company’s website, Marketwatch, Nasdaq, BigCharts, or Yahoo Finance to find historical high and low prices for the year you know you purchased the shares sold.
If your best educated guess is a date range rather than a specific date, use the historical prices at the start date and end date of that time-frame to come up with an average stock price for that time period. Make sure you keep a record of your calculation in case the IRS would like to know how you came up with your cost basis.
Stock investment not sold but turbo tax is erroring as not incomplete. It wants "sold" date and "cost basis". It hasn't been sold yet. How do I proceed?
@euroskin1 If you have not yet sold the stock, no taxable/reportable event has occurred yet, so you should delete those "transactions" from your return. Purchasing stock does not create a taxable event. Increase in value while still holding the stock does not create a taxable event. Selling the stock does create a taxable event and you report the sale in the year that you do. If sold through a brokerage, you will receive a Form 1099-B that will provide all the information to correctly fill out the fields you see.
I did import from the brokerage firm. There was only one stock of many not sold on the form so I cannot delete the form. Should I just leave it blank (date sold, cost basis) and submit my Turbo Tax with that “error”? Thank you so much!!
That sounds best, but it seems strange that the "transaction" is being reported on the 1099-B. That makes me suspect that that particular stock went worthless. If true, the sales price is 0. What does your brokerage statement show? Does it report a loss on that transaction, or nothing? If nothing, then yes go ahead and delete the information in the fields.
If the original cost is 6.97, then you will put a 0 in the sales price, because apparently that stock went worthless. There may even be a note on the transaction. And if not, then you will subtract 6.97 from the cost and that is the sales price to get a 6.97 loss.
During 1974 or 1973 I purchased either 100 or 200 shares of ITEL Corporation thriugh Kidder Peabody, the broker no longer exists....my shares were reduced to 9 shares then became 18 shares of Anixter...recently WESCO has obtained Anixter and offered to buy me out of my odd lot shares....so I took it receiving only a few dollars some $ 1349.75 from my initial investment of over ten thousand dollars....how do I report same...
You can do research on the web to find when ITEL shares became Anixter. This should help you determine how many shares of ITEL you had that were turned in for the 9 shares of Anixter. There are several websites that have historical stock prices including yahoo finance. You can look at the selling prices and make an educated guess as to what you paid for the shares. This may take some time and searching.
The IRS realizes that many people do not have accurate records from over 40 years ago and just want a good faith effort to have an accurate cost basis. A law was passed that requires brokerage houses to include this information on the 1099s starting in 2011.