Image Credit: Robert Neubecker
By Tara Siegel Bernard
Until recently, the tax man rarely held you accountable for how much you profited — or lost — when you sold stocks or mutual funds.
Instead, reporting those numbers on your tax return was generally based on the honor system: You reported how much you bought the stock for, and if you lost track or couldn’t remember, you made your best guess. The tax collectors didn’t have an automated way of checking your calculations.
Those days are over, at least in part. For the second consecutive tax season, a new law requires your investment brokerage firm to report to the I.R.S. the price you paid for certain taxable investments, known as your cost basis, a figure that also takes into account items like reinvested dividends, stock splits and company mergers. With your cost basis in hand, you can then figure out how much you’ve gained or lost when you sold the investment, which is then reported on the Schedule D tax form.
