Anyone understands how to read the tax reports provided by IB? (or has an accountant who can help)

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Hi all,

I realized this is not a typical forum question…

Several years ago I managed to decipher the IB tax reports to figure out what to declare in the United Kingdom (where i am currently) i.e. make sense of cap gains, dividends, tax automatically withheld by the USA, Interest paid to IB, Other fees (data), and Forex gain / loss on cash held in another currency than base.

However a recent conversation with a friend raised some doubts.

So I would be curious to double check if anyone has a view or knows someone who has. Let me mention very clearly that I am not asking for tax advice. I just want to decipher the IB reports correctly e.g. confirm answers to questions such as “are Capital Gains over the fiscal year in the section ‘Realized Performance Summary in Base’ ?”
Feel free to pm me (or answer directly on this thread if you have a ‘sanitized’ answer that you are happy to share publicly).

Status to-date:

  • The UK tax authorities have not complained in several years. But I believe it is because they can’t make sense of the reports either (and I am not a big-enough fish for them to bother).
  • IB customer service is useless and after about 10 messages back and forth I got almost nowhere (other than confirming that mark-to-market is definitely not the right section to look at)
  • my own accountant has given up
  • the accountant of a professional individual trader I know in Germany was definitely doing it wrong
  • I read lots of complains about IB tax reports

Many thanks,

Jerome

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I’ve never bothered with them. I calculate my adjusted cost basis and subsequent gains from the actual execution data for price and commissions. Generally these numbers agree with the realized gain reported on a per trade basis on the IB reports, but NOT the summary numbers in the tax reports themselves.

There is a tax credit in Canada that gets back most of the withholding tax on foreign dividends, so I base that claim on actual dividends paid and withheld according to the statements (not the tax reports). I haven’t even checked the tax reports on these to be honest.

If you use the flex query in IB you can generally get the data into a format that is easily massaged into a csv file that can be used to import the data into a tax package specific to your jurisdiction. I have some scripts that do this and then I feed the raw data to my accountant’s tax software and my own ledger at the same time.

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I calculate my own gains/losses too. But I use the IB Canada tax slips to report income. I find they are very close to my numbers, even for US income.