I have a nephew who has a small stock market account (in the U.S., through TD Ameritrade). He is a high school age minor, so it is a custodian account. He started out with about $7,000 in the account a few years ago, then bought and sold a bunch of penny stocks -- and he lost almost all of it. His mother is just getting around to getting her and my nephew's taxes done and filed for 2007 and 2008. The bookkeeper/accountant who is doing the taxes said that since my nephew had many transactions in the TD Ameritrade account (close to 100?), it will take a lot of time to sort them out and it could be an expensive process.
Since the overall net of all of the in and out trades in an almost total loss, is there any way to just do an estimate for IRS tax purposes and just show an estimated net loss rather than trying to re-create and sort out each and every transaction?