• Wash sale -- how does IRS find out?

    From Stan Brown@21:1/5 to All on Wed May 15 16:54:48 2024
    So I accidentally created a wash sale last month in my Vanguard non- tax-advantaged account: I sold the total stock fund near its all-time
    high, even though I had an automatically reinvested dividend from
    less than 30 days earlier. Vanguard's Cost Basis report displays the
    wash sale and says that its year-end 1099 will disallow the
    appropriate amount of capital loss -- $1.42, if I remember right.

    But I looked further on the site, and they say that they don't or
    can't diagnose wash sales when the sale and the purchase happen in
    two different accounts of the same investor. So my question is, if
    Vanguard doesn't keep track of them, how would the IRS get the
    information? Is this something where the taxpayer either does the
    right thing or not, and short of an audit the IRS takes their word
    for it?

    Just to be clear, this is a theoretical question to satisfy my
    curiosity. I don't actually have any other wash sales between that
    account and my Vanguard IRAs.


    --
    Stan Brown, Tehachapi, California, USA https://BrownMath.com/
    Shikata ga nai...

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