Wash sale loss disallowed.... skip December?

[jm0895]

No matter how many calls you make to the brokerage houses and ask multiple times you will receive the same exact information that they cannot give you any advice since they are not tax professionals and they do not offer any help in deciding how to get rid of a wash sales. Trust me I have spent countless hours researching and calling and I have gotten absolutely no where.

I then ask my tax professional and receive absolutely zero help, they said the same thing you did. That they have to go off the 1099 no matter what.

What I once again don't understand is the fact you mentioned that the trades were closed out months before December 2021 and never traded again. I did the same exact thing you did and still had wash sales.

I really cannot comprehend why this issue isn't being addressed and being looked into, I mean I see literally thousands of posts on wash sales all over the forums and the answers to these wash sales seem as easy as making a ham sandwich yet everything you apply to making the wash disappear DOES NOT WORK.

I think I figured out my issue and it's essentially a few things that were throwing me off and causing a lot of confusion. After going through some trades by hand and comparing them I came to these conclusions:

1.) From what I can tell 1099 summary of trade breakdowns by symbols is basically worthless garbage data. I was trying to cross reference it with both my raw PnL and the 8949 form but they don't match up at all. I wish I knew what was causing this discrepancy but I can't tell for sure, maybe it has something to do with buying/selling options and letting them expire worthless?

2.) The broker appears to add the cost basis correctly from previous wash sales on the 8949 form to trade when they are closed, but it doesn't appear to be correct on the 1099 breakdown. This was very confusing to me until I came to the conclusion that the totals on the right hand column of the 8949 "(h) Gain or (loss)" are the only thing that matters and as long as those totals matched my raw PnL then it all begins to make sense.

3.) The numbers on the 8949 form were correct and matched my raw PnL which I obtained by downloading my entire trade history from Interactive Brokers. This is based on a sample where I checked by hand some of the larger discrepancies I noticed between the 1099, 8949 and raw PnL.

4.) Adding further confusion to the situation, options on GLD, SLV and UNG are treated as 1256 transactions which was throwing me off when I tried to calculate my total taxable raw PnL for short term gains using my trade history totals and comparing to the 8949 form totals. Only by breaking down and cross checking individual symbols was I able to gain some confidence that the numbers were correct.

In the end I'm still not sure wtf is going on with the 1099 form with the trade breakdowns and why they don't match up, it just appears to be garbage data - however the total numbers at the bottom of the 1099 match the 8949 form - which from my limited testing appear to be correct and correspond to my raw PnL. So I'm just gonna go with it and hope everything Interactive Brokers supplied to me is correct.

Hope this helps.

 

[Jzwu2017]

Yes, that’s the key as long as the final total P/L numbers are correct. That’s all that matters.

I think 1099 uses some kind of software to calculate wash sales so it can be quite different from the real trades. Go back to my post #70 on page 7 to get a feel on how complicated wash sales can become if you repeatedly trade the same stock like in day trading.