Everyone that bought and sold stock in 1997, read on, important!
This is a serious post.
This month you guys and gals are going to get brokerager statemens which summarize the year's transactions. Whatever you do, make sure that your proceeds, the proceeds stated on the brokerage statement, match your total selling prices listed on Sch. D. Gain or Loss from the sale of assets.. the brokerage firms send this to the IRS and the IRS matches these numbers with your tax returns. If they don't match, IRS assumes unreported income, even if you lost, they assume that you were not reporting all of your income. The cost figures aren't matched with anything. Now, how to report those sales.
You don't have to list each transaction, you can summarize transactions, even list totals per broker. For example: You deal with Schwab, did 50 transactions this year. List it like this:
Schwab (not individual companes) and the buy and sell dates as various and dollar totals in the proper boxes.
This will save lots of hasstle and tax prep. fees. When I worked for Touche they loved to list each stock transaction, went on for pages, then they billed for the time. H & R block bills for the lines and pages.
new tax laws may treat gains and losses in different tax brackets based opon the time you held the investment. If that's the case break down the investment totals by the times held, as per the tax law breakdown.
Just another service of uncle Al, the taxpayer's pal. |
