This may be specific to calendar spreads but bottom line is I have about 1600 IB trades and when I import them into turbo tax many of them have a negative Cost basis and a blank net proceeds column in turbotax. (Import file originates from the IB Account Tax section) When I delete the trades in turbo tax File -> Remove Imported Data They are all nulled out (no dates, no $$$) but the "Investment Sales Summary" in turbo tax still shows all 1600 trades (all blank). When I try to re-import them I exceed the 3000 trade limit in Turbo Tax and the system doesn't support it and doesn't allow the import. I know this is very late (tax day is in less than a week) but how do other folks work around this? For all IB/Turbo Tax users, do you guys have the same issues with your IB export files? Meaning when you import them it shows a negative cost basis on some trades and the net proceeds is blank (which Turbo Tax complains in the Review report). Any help is appreciated Martin http://mwtrader.blogspot.com
I had similar experience. In my case, I had total about 500 trades from IB. After importing into TurboTax, some of the wash sale entries (with losses) showed negative cost base just like what you described. Since there are only less than 30 entries like that, I manually edited them in TurboTax. It did not affect the bottom line, so I filed my tax like that. If there are not too many, you can try to edit them one by one.
So how did you fix them? Just move the negative cost basis to 0 and put the same value (*-1) into the gains column? So when it originally said gains 0 cost basis -300 did you move it to gains 300 cost basis 0 Did that happen on stock trades for you or on option trades? I figured this is related to options, rolls and assignment but didn't really know what the root cause of these was. The problem with fixing it manually is, every single row takes about 45 seconds for turbo tax to process (they do some real time calculation) and I've about 500 rows I'll need to fix. So I wanted to delete them all and import them with the fixed format but I've a hard time getting them out of the system. Thanks for your input Martin http://mwtrader.blogspot.com
Yes. The only reason I made the changes is that TT final review complained about those errors and wouldn't finalize. I did that manually for about 28 entries and TT did not complain anymore. This did not alter the final total for me so I think it is fine. I already go the refund check. It took me a couple of hours. The other way I read from TurboTax tech support website as to how to make large changes is to convert IB's file into Quicken format, make your modifications there, then import into TT. I don't have Quicken so I did not bother to purchase and correct IB file that way. I just took the time and manually changed my 28 entries. You might want to look into Quicken.
Here's my turbo tax rant/recap http://mwtrader.blogspot.com/2010/04/traders-and-turbo-tax-rant.html I'm able to file my taxes but bottom line is I would not recommend Turbo Tax and IB to anyone. It's a bad and "incomplete" offering for traders.