I hear you. My problem is that I get a lot of accounts from people who have made periodic payments into mutual funds for years. Those are a bitch!
In those cases, we contacted the fund companies directly, asked them to deliver annual tax notices from the past, made it pretty easy.
But only in cases where people started, stopped, and did not have enough information for us.
Otherwise, if they could tell us when they started, and how much they were putting in, we just did the calcs on hysales using a sys investmetn option on the program. As far as accuracy goes, you just use the current number of shares, relative to the hypos for cross reference. If it is close, you’re good to go.
I have not checked, but I’m pretty darn sure the IRS would be ecstatic about the method, find it completely reasonalbe for use. I have called the IRS before on a basis issue that was very complicated with an employee stock purchase program. They said when all else fails, they expect an honest best effort. What i’m doing goes way beyond that.
This has also been a real customer service issue too, and we’ve been rewarded by clients that recognize that we did something in their best efforts. I mean we’re talking tens of mill in new assets. Nobody else does this for them...