A few years ago I held some shares in Royal Ahold, a Netherlands-based company which at that time owned Giant supermarkets in the USA.
I'm not entirely clear what happened, but there was a near-collapse -- during the Enron and Worldcom scandals.
At some point I was invited to join a class action, which I did, while thinking I'd be wasting my time. Lo and behold, today I got a check for $431.
Now comes the tax question: These shares were held in my IRA account, but the settlement payment was made directly to me. As far as I can tell nothing went through my IRA custodian broker.
So how should this settlement be reported on my return for 2007?
I would assume it would be reported as an IRA withdrawal, except that the IRA custodian seems to have no record and reported nothing.
I should add, because it was in an IRA account, I never claimed any loss on the shares.