Yes, you can file your taxes even if you have an unresolved Missing Cost Basis Warning (MCB) on your account. In many cases, MCB Warnings will not have a significant effect on your gains and losses.
CoinLedger will still generate a tax report for your account even if Missing Cost Basis Warnings are present. Any trades with a missing cost basis will simply be treated with a zero dollar cost basis — which is the most conservative approach and ensures you will not get audited by the IRS.
By assigning a cost basis of zero dollars to your assets with a missing basis, we ensure that you are not underreporting your capital gains to the IRS.
If there is a small Missing Cost Basis warning on your account, you can choose to leave it unresolved if it's not having a material impact on your report. You can guage the impact of a warning on the Missing Cost Basis Troubleshooting page. Here, you will see the total impact each MCB warning has on your tax report.
In the example above, you can see that my Ronin missing cost basis has a Potential Impact of only $46.
If your warning has an insignificant (or even $0) impact on your potential gains and losses, it can safely be ignored. The IRS allows this.
To ignore a Missing Cost Basis Warning, follow the steps below:
Ignoring a Missing Cost Basis Warning
Ignoring a Missing Cost Basis Warning
When you ignore a Missing Cost Basis Warning, CoinLedger will no longer show you warnings for disposals of that asset. You may see warnings pop up for disposals of that asset in later tax years, however.
For example: if I ignore a MCB warning for ADA in 2023, I will no longer see any missing basis warnings for ADA on my 2023 tax report. But If I import new data in 2026 that contains disposals of ADA, I may see a missing cost basis warning pop up then.
Ignoring a missing cost basis is allowed by the IRS, but it may result in higher capital gains since our system will assign a cost basis of zero dollars to these assets. If you are willing to accept these potentially higher gains and move on from this missing basis, you can ignore it via the steps below:
Step 1
First, identify the warning you'd like to ignore. You can do this from the MCB Troubleshooting Tab by clicking View and jumping to the first disposal of that asset with a missing cost basis.
You can also do this by clicking on a specific warning from the To Review tab (located on the Transactions page).
Step 2
Once you've identified the missing cost basis you'd like to ignore, click Ignore this warning.
Step 3
Next, you'll be asked to confirm that you want to ignore this warning. Once you click Confirm, missing cost basis warnings for disposals of this asset will no longer appear for the tax year in which the transaction took place.
For example: by ignoring this missing cost basis warning for SOL, I will no longer see any warnings for disposals of SOL on my 2021 tax report. I may see warnings pop up for disposals of SOL in later tax years, however.
You can undo these changes by visiting the Advanced Settings page and navigating to the Hidden Missing Basis Warnings section. To unignore a Missing Cost Basis Warning, simply click the three dots next to the warning and press Restore.
