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IB Suggestions & Improvements
- Thread starter Babak
- Start date
Quote from Kensho:
IB: time is money and if you want to save your customers billions of hours in time trying comply with IRS Schedules D-1 request, why don't you just provide your customers purchase and sales information in the format that IRS demands?
I like this idea. A broker that offered a Schedule D-1 for each taxable personal account, in addition to the normal statements, would be offering its customers a HUGE service.
It is very difficult for a broker to provide the cost basis side of a Schedule D.
Easiest example is a transfer of your account between brokers. A more complex example is acquiring stock via an option exercise. Or adjusting your basis for stock dividends on which you have paid tax already.
Long term vs Short term. You designate which shares are being sold against which purchase. IB does not have a clue unless you sell the entire position. Etc. etc.
They can always provide the net proceeds of a sale. But that is just half of the Schedule D entry for a stock.
Jack
Easiest example is a transfer of your account between brokers. A more complex example is acquiring stock via an option exercise. Or adjusting your basis for stock dividends on which you have paid tax already.
Long term vs Short term. You designate which shares are being sold against which purchase. IB does not have a clue unless you sell the entire position. Etc. etc.
They can always provide the net proceeds of a sale. But that is just half of the Schedule D entry for a stock.
Jack
You may want to check out IBTrade (http://potrix.com/ibtrade) for generating P/L reports. It aggregates fills as reported by IB statements into trades. Using another software, which lists each fill in the P/L report, I got 80 pages for my account. With IBTrade, it's 8 pages.
Quote from roncer:
I printed out over 500 pages of trades from my 2006 IB statements. My tax guy is sending it in to the IRS. It's the size of a large telephone directory.
Your "tax guy" must not have any other active trader clients, or talk with other tax pros about the subject. The IRS neither needs nor wants the details of individual trades when they span more than a page or two. Just make sure you have the details available if you get audited. I use one line per account for stock trades (so the proceeds match the individual 1099 amounts), plus additional lines for futures (to match 1099C) and options (no 1099 for these) as needed.
I think IB is already making a stab at the P&L issue - the request is just that it gets filtered down to the right format for sched D, instead of the user having to filter out the appropriate lines from the statement by hand.
I printed out over 500 pages of trades from my 2006 IB statements. My tax guy is sending it in to the IRS. It's the size of a large telephone directory.
Your "tax guy" must not have any other active trader clients, or talk with other tax pros about the subject. The IRS neither needs nor wants the details of individual trades when they span more than a page or two. Just make sure you have the details available if you get audited. I use one line per account for stock trades (so the proceeds match the individual 1099 amounts), plus additional lines for futures (to match 1099C) and options (no 1099 for these) as needed.
I think IB is already making a stab at the P&L issue - the request is just that it gets filtered down to the right format for sched D, instead of the user having to filter out the appropriate lines from the statement by hand.
Quote from easyrider:
Hey IB. Im not using Booktrader to trade with but I do like to use it for DOM display rather than the other DOM but in the unarmed state its hard to see. I dont like to use it armed because of the possibility of accidents. I dont think Im the only one who wants to use the vertical dom display. Can we get another option?
We will restore clarity to the Book Trader in the unarmed state.
Dave