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Can I file my taxes with an unresolved Missing Cost Basis?

David Kemmerer avatar
Written by David Kemmerer
Updated this week

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 β€” 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.

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