1099-DA Forms Leave Crypto Filers With Missing Cost Basis — SkimNews
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- 2025 1099-DA forms report gross proceeds but not cost basis, forcing taxpayers to reconstruct what they originally paid across exchanges, wallets, and years — what Herbst calls "a record-keeping gap on the taxpayer side as much as a reporting gap on the exchange side."
- Sharon Yip of Crypto Tax Advisors found discrepancies between client 1099-DAs and her firm's prepared crypto tax reports, including missing trades and inconsistent cost-basis reporting across exchanges, even though basis reporting wasn't mandatory for 2025.
- One client had more than $300,000 in stablecoin trades on an exchange in 2025, but the exchange's 1099-DA showed less than $100,000 in total stablecoin proceeds — illustrating how the forms can understate activity.
- Kraken reportedly did not send 1099-DA forms to users until roughly two weeks before the April 15 tax deadline, and at least one Kraken form showed no reported transaction information at all, according to Awaken Tax founder Andrew Duca; Kraken did not respond to comment.
- Andrew Gordon of Digital Asset Tax Action said brokers did not provide 2025 forms in a machine-readable format, forcing active traders to manually enter hundreds of line items because most crypto tax software can't import the data directly.
- From 2026, brokers must generally report cost basis for covered digital assets — though assets transferred in from another exchange or wallet can still fall outside those requirements, meaning the "zero-basis problem" won't fully disappear.
Why it matters: Crypto taxpayers filing for 2025 are getting new IRS visibility into their proceeds but no matching cost basis — meaning a $10,000 sale could be reported with no record of the $9,000 paid, forcing individuals to reconstruct years of cross-platform transaction history or risk overpaying. With Kraken delivering forms two weeks before the deadline and at least one form containing no transaction data, hundreds of hours of manual reconciliation fell on filers for a reporting regime that, from 2026, will still leave transferred assets in a basis gap.
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