Waiting for a 1099 to come in
Question: Any reason why I haven’t received my 1099 for my investment account?
Answer: More and more companies are not mailing out tax forms and instead, account holders must go online to retrieve the appropriate tax information necessary to prepare a complete and accurate tax return. This is ostensibly an effort to be ‘green’ .
While this approach saves postage and printing costs, going green condenses our timeframe to complete tax returns before the April 15th deadline. In other words, along with a few other required reporting changes brokerage houses will have to adhere to in the future (cost basis statements on all investments,) fewer and fewer investors will be able to complete their individual income tax returns in February.
Further, many brokerage houses are waiting to send out tax forms at the end of FEBRUARY rather than the end of JANUARY in order to avoid sending out corrected tax forms. This is now commonplace because during the last several years many brokerage houses have had to send out a second tax form after the initial tax form contained erroneous or incorrect information.
