Personal Finance and Investing

In my CPA practice, I've had to compute the tax basis of stock or fund shares when my taxpayers' brokers can't provide them and there aren't complete statement records. You will need to know the date and amount of your mother's original purchase. If she made subsequent purchases, you'll need to know the dates and amounts for those as well.

Once you have this, you can google the ticker symbol for the fund to get it's daily share value and transaction history records. Sometimes a fund's website will have the history of the daily values and cash or stock dividends. The combination of the values from the statements your mother has on hand plus the computed values from the historical value and transactions records that you look up will be adequate to support your computation of the fund's tax basis for the IRS.

Also, if your mother gave her tax preparer the fund's 1099 in the year the shares were sold and the sale wasn't reported in her return, you definitely have preparer error. That kind of thing rarely happens but my rule is that if I make an error resulting in taxes owed, plus penalty and interest, I cover any penalty charged - plus I'd comp a portion of my tax prep fee. Just a thought.