Taxes on selling long-term stock

[Jeremy1214]

I just sold 460 shares of Bigen and know I made a big profit. I bought the stock about 35 years ago. How do I find the buy date and what I paid for it. Bigen has no record of stock splits and pays no dividends. Thanks - Ron

[fanfare]

When you buy stock or mutual funds you're supposed to keep accurate records.

Otherwise, IRS will assume your cost/basis is zero.

@Jeremy1214 

[Mike9241]

as a minimum, you would have to know the trade date.  online quotes don't go back 35 years but i do believe libraries contain historical prices going back even further on microfiche - ie copies of the WSJ and other financial dailies. but that may only be big libraries. 

by the way is the name correct or do you mean Biogen? 

[Opus 17]

Here's the problem: you have the burden of proof for everything you claim on your tax return.  You might be able to find a 35 year old stock price from the company's web site or newspaper archives in a library, and you could prepare a tax return using your best guess of what your cost was.  But if audited, the IRS does not have to give you anything you can't prove.  The IRS could assess capital gains tax as if your cost basis was zero.

Do you have any records at all that would at least show you have owned this stock for more than 1 year?  If you can't even prove that, the IRS could deny you the long term capital gain rate too.  

[NCperson]

@Jeremy1214 and if you do mean Biogen, you might just want to assume $0 - it may save you a lot of time

a quick Yahoo Finance search shows the price 31 years ago at $2.84 per share and it is possible you purchased it for even less than that.  Even if you purchased at $3 and assumed zero, that is a cost basis of $1380 and even at 23.8% capital gains, it's only worth around $325 in tax difference.