grouping sales of same security on Schedule D

Other than your eclaration that there's no issue of wash sales, nothing in the nessage let;s us know that.

So I suppose wash sales are possible.

The rules say to report all sals, though ou may group together various buys.

If you wish to ignore rules that you believe are there for "no conceivable reason" I can suggest message boards that will be plenty receptive to your beliefs.

Is this an audit ? You have no way of knowing than ANYTHING I say is true or not. I'm giving you an honest assessment of my situation and asking for advice, and you implicitly accuse me of lying ?

Last time I checked, you don't report buys. Are you trying to say that if one sale included shares from multiple buys, then it's ok to group the buys for cost-basis purposes ?

Seriously, why so insulting ? I'm simply trying to figure out what the IRS expects. I find that the IRS tends to be fairly reasonable and logical about this kind of stuff, so it seems reasonable to me that they wouldn't require the sales to be listed separately.

H&R Block's Home Edition (or whatever they're calling TaxCut this year) accepts var-s (various-short) and var-l as purchase dates for securities sold on the same date, so it allows purchases on different dates to be lumped together (which I guess means that it's okay with the IRS). I don't believe that sales on different dates can be lumped because the 1099 reports sale dates.

If you do anyway, and if you're audited, as long as you can show the IRS that you accounted for all the sales on the 1099, you'll probably be off the hook because you'll be able to account for all transactions reported on the 1099.

Incidentally, for those of you who've never had the pleasure and thrill of being assessed tax, interest, and penalty for alleged unreported income, what the IRS would probably do is to ignore that the amount reported sold on, say, Oct 2, 2009 is substantially greater than what's on the 1099 for that date, but instead consider the entire amount of the sales on July 15, 2009, September 3, 2009, and September

You report buys along with the sale. You report each sale separately. There is no grouping for calculating basis (FIFO is the default), but if one sale involves shares bought at different times you can lump the buys, using "various" for the date purchased. (You already stated that all your sales were short-term.)

See Publications 550 and 551 regarding basis and the Schedule D instructions for your reporting options.

Phil Marti VITA Volunteer

You're over-react> All sales of the

That statement is not enough to establish that there were no wash sales.

If you had no purchases/sales in late 2008, early 2010, and "later in the year" means sufficiently later, then OK. To establish whether or not there was a wash sale, you have to count actual days before and after each and every sale.

Of course you report the "buy" (cost basis) for each sale. Yes, he is saying that multiple purchases all sold at one time can be aggregated on one line of Schedule D, as other replies have indicated.

Pe> some

It won't be a "tax clerk", it will be a computer doing the matching. A tax clerk might be involved in keypunching your data if you paper file, that's it.

You can also summarize your data on Schedule D and send a listing formatted like Schedule D-1 as supporting detail (your brokerage statement might meet this requirement), see the instructions for Schedule D.

-Mark Bole

If he sold out entirely, and stayed out this year, then there are no wash sales. (OK, technically there might be some, but it doesn't matter.)

But irrelevant.

Seth