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Started by Peter, March 07, 2013, 11:00:00 PM

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AmCap

Peter wanted to know my thoughts on his tax post.  Of course well written but I have to quarrel with some things.  Generally not Peter's fault, but rather LC and Prosper's since it looks like they gave him incorrect information in several respects. 

Quote

Randawl

Love the discussion, thank you for posting this.

*goes and gets more wine anyway*

Peter

Thanks AmCap, I appreciate your detailed thoughts. Well I am bewildered. I spent a great deal of time confirming with LC and Prosper that I had it correct. But it is clear there is a disconnect. For one, Prosper and Lending Club offer identical investments (from a tax perspective) so you would think that their tax treatment would be identical. Seeing that it is not has always raised a bit of a red flag for me.

What I wish they would do is both hire a tax lawyer, preferably the same one, and get this right once and for all. How hard can it be?

Now, back to my wine...
Publisher of the Lend Academy blog

See my returns here: http://www.lendacademy.com/returns

writing2reality

*burp*

Nice work AmCap, thank you for your analysis.

And I agree with Peter... They are big enough, especially now, that there is no excuse for them not to have taken the appropriate steps in hiring a tax lawyer.

brycemason

AmCap, what an informative and thorough post! Well done!

Wine time.

jpildis

As much as I would like to use Section 166 to turn my long term defaults into short-term losses, the statute clearly states that this rule does not apply to securities as defined by 165(g)(2)(C):

For purposes of this subsection, the term "security" means—
(A) a share of stock in a corporation;
(B) a right to subscribe for, or to receive, a share of stock in a corporation; or
(C) a bond, debenture, note, or certificate, or other evidence of indebtedness, issued by a corporation or by a government or political subdivision thereof, with interest coupons or in registered form.

Based on this, I think it's clear LC & Prosper notes are securities.


PennySaved

I understand from AmCap his discussions of OID, what it is supposed to be and what LC says it is from their prospectus.  But for my charged-off  LC loans, the Interest OID reported for these loans was actual interest received and did not include any accrued interest during the time that payments were missed by the borrower before the loan was charged.  While this may be incorrect reporting of interest by LC, it sure makes it easier for reporting the charge-offs on my taxes.  I don't have to do any calculations per charged-off note to adjust the basis of the notes as was explained in another posting (was maybe by AmCap, not sure).  That threw me off and had me scrutinizing every charge off carefully to figure out the actual interest received versus the interest OID reported by LC, on both the original and revised OID forms issued.  Basically, LC did not include accrued interest and I then figured out that they had deducted the service fee from the interest before reporting it as OID.  Maybe this is why LC is reporting OID this way- to save us a lot of work on calculating the amount of charge-offs to deduct for taxes.  Maybe technically they should not be doing this, but I, for now, am glad they are. Now that I understand all this, hopefully next tax year will go a little smoother. 

Perhaps what they should be doing is correctly reporting OID with accrued interest, then for charge-off loans issuing lenders a report with each charge-off adjusted by accrued interest (this would be a bear for us to figure out for every charged off note) so we have a accurate listing of the losses to report on Schedule  D.  We would be allowed to deduct this accrued interest because it had been included it as taxable interest OID, maybe in the same tax year or the prior tax year. Anyway, as time goes on perhaps the tax reporting will become simpler and more understandable.  And big thanks to Peter, for taking the effort to explain the tax forms for both Prosper and LC.

rawraw

I'm starting an AmCap fan club.

TravelingPennies


TravelingPennies

Count me as a member of the AmCap fan club.  I have learned so much from his posts. 

Also more thanks to Peter for finding out that the late fees are now included on 1099-OID.  I had gotten these off my monthly statements for previous tax years and reported them as misc. income.  Now I don't have to bother with that. I can now forget about  the extra $0.20 I was reporting as misc income for 2012 because it should already be included on the 1099-OID.  I know these amounts are insignificant but I want to understand what the heck I am doing on my tax forms and why.  If my LC investments increase in the future, these types of problems and mistakes will cost me more.

I was thinking that now that I have Peter's post, I am finally ready to finish my taxes, but wait!  I just forgot about a problem I saw with my 1099-B from Lending Club.  They had contradictory reporting of my recoveries as short-term and long-term on the same 1099-B form.  I sent them the following email on 2/23/12 to [email protected]    This is the email address given on the bottom of the form to report any problems or questions.  I have not heard anything back (sigh).

Email to Lending Club: This attached Form 1099-B is reporting my recoveries on charged off loans.  It list two short term loan recoveries which total $0.91 and four long term loan recoveries which total $0.99 if you total them by how each note is listed as short- term or long- term in Box 1c of Form 1099-B . However, the form1099-B reports short term subtotals as $1.12 and long term subtotals as $0.78, which conflicts with how the loans are classified in Box 1c.  The grand total is the same, $1.90.  I need to know the correct amounts because I have to report short term recovery amounts on a different part of the tax form 8949 from the long term recovery amounts.    Please advise.   

I went ahead and filled out two Form 8949s for the short and long term recoveries (as basis not reported to IRS) based on the characterization reported in box 1c, not based on the description of the subtotals.  I nearly forgot about this problem.  I guess I could try and call Lending Club on Monday.  I really want to get this tax stuff over with.  Anyone else have this same 1099-B problem?

TravelingPennies

Regarding LC mistakes on my 1099-B as reported in my above post, I was thinking it did not make a difference on my overall taxes how I reported the totals for this year, plus it seemed obvious that the characterizations of the recoveries as reported in box 1c were correct given length of time between the Date of Acquisition reported in Box 1b and Date of Sale or Exchange reported in Box 1a.  Based on those dates I can clearly see which notes were charged off within a year or not. 

But NO.  After checking my spreadsheet of detailed info I had previously put together on my charged off loans,  the Dates of Sale or Exchange reported for my six note recoveries does not match what is reported as charge off date  in collection log for each of the six notes.  Sigh.  The charge off dates are all earlier than the reported Date of Sale or Exchange on 1099-B.  So does this mean the reported Dates of Sale on Form 1099-B are the dates then notes were sold to collection agencies?  And is this the date I should be reporting on column C of Form 8949 for date sold or disposed?  I had used the charge off date for these loans on Form 8949.   

This also brings up the issue of how can I be declaring these charge-offs as bad debt in the same tax year as I have recoveries for the same notes.  I did not see anything in the IRS regs against doing this, but I can't keep tabs forever on charged off notes to see if and when recoveries might occur.

TravelingPennies

Interesting, at the bottom of the LC 1099-B, it says if you have any questions regarding 1099 statement to send email to [email protected] or call 888-596-3159. 

On the LC website, it give a different email address.
   What if I have questions?
If you have questions about what data is being reported on the year-end statement or IRS 1099 forms, please email investing@lendingcl ub.com or call (888) 596-3159. Tax questions should be directed to your financial or tax advisor.  Lending Club does not provide tax advice and...


So maybe I need to send my email to the investing@... address.  I wanted to do email because I could then attach the 1099-B.

By the way, I opened a Roth IRA LC account in January (separate for LC account that I am dealing with taxes on).  I emailed the application to the [email protected] as instructed and waited.  Never heard anything.  Then I had to call them and and resend the email to a specific name.  They also went back to find my original email and said it was there, must have been "overlooked".  So I am going to resend the email regarding my 1099-B to the "[email protected] also call them. 

My charge-off dates are not matching the 1099-B sale dates on my six note recoveries except in one case.  The other five sale dates are all the same date, 10/16/12 and don't seem to match up to anything in the collection logs.  Three notes have $0.02 recovery reported on 1099-B but the the reported recovery shown for the note(s) on the LC website is reported as Zero.  Other notes have recovery values on 1099-B lower than the recovery amt reported on the website, but I understand that recovery late and service fees have probably been subtracted from the amount recovered, because these fees are supposedly included on 1099-OID, according to Peter.

alchemista

Thanks for the discussion posts.  When I view the IRS instructions (http://www.irs.gov/taxtopics/tc453.html" class="bbc_link" target="_blank">http://www.irs.gov/taxtopics/tc453.html), it says that nonbusiness bad debts require a separate bad debt statement to be attached, with extra information on what you tried to do to collect, etc.  Is this really required for LC's charged-off loans?  Is that what everyone is doing?

H&R Block says that you cannot efile either if you have nonbusiness bad debts - likely because of the bad debt statement requirement.

I realized I never wrote-off the charged-off loans from last year, but it was only $100ish so it's not worth doing an amendment.  I may just skip it this year as well for $90ish of charge-offs.

The tax issues with these small loans is ridiculous - think I'm just going to withdraw from LC - I'm only making about 5-6% there anyway.

TravelingPennies

Alchemista...that makes me sad to hear that tax would cause you to withdraw.  Hopefully we can work to make the tax side no more difficult than if you owned a mutual fund.  Stick with us!

NEW LOANS:   | 804.eth 2.500 Ξ | remoraid.eth 0.299 Ξ | remoraid.eth 0.299 Ξ | ALL