TokyoBoglehead wrote: ↑Sun Mar 05, 2023 5:20 am
Foreign dividends. So received in say USD and converted by the person? Or automatically converted by the exchanges?
Specifically in Interactive Brokers. I'm not sure if the person is converting to yen or using the dollars to buy more stocks/ETFs.
Yikes, hadn't even considered that one.
English teacher and writer. RetireJapan founder. Avid reader.
TokyoBoglehead wrote: ↑Sun Mar 05, 2023 5:20 am
Foreign dividends. So received in say USD and converted by the person? Or automatically converted by the exchanges?
Specifically in Interactive Brokers. I'm not sure if the person is converting to yen or using the dollars to buy more stocks/ETFs.
Yikes, hadn't even considered that one.
It would have to be the day of receiving them right? Unless otherwise stated by the exchange or broker.
RetireJapan wrote: ↑Thu Mar 02, 2023 8:33 am
What date to use for the exchange rate when reporting foreign dividends?
Report date? Ex- date? Date the money arrives in your account?
Apologies for coming late to this thread but I thought about this foreign dividend reporting problem again when I reviewed my draft Japanese tax return yesterday.
The US IRS does not require brokerages to report the dividend payment date. For instance, I have accounts at Schwab, Fidelity and Vanguard. Of the three only Fidelity even makes an effort to give the actual dividend payment date in the supplementary pages of the 1099 form used for tax reporting. Both Schwab and Vanguard are only giving the total amount paid in the year by position. I have always been impressed by how thoroughly Captainspoke is tracking and reporting the dividend equivalent in yen based on the exchange rate on receipt but my Japanese accountants have never done that for my account. My foreign accounts are complicated because of the large number of individual positions including many of which are non-US stocks and I don't know if that is why the tax office has not raised any objections but at least in my case the Japanese tax return is only reporting total dividends received by account (e.g. Schwab = X, Fidelity = Y, etc.) on the 所得の内訳書 and that is all added together for one entry on the 第三表. I've been audited a few times but the exchange calculation has never been an issue.
I never use the 1099 for my prep here. The account page has a 'history' tab--click on that, and then you can filter on maybe a dozen different things.
Deselect all, then click on (select) Dividends, and insure that 'previous year' is selected, and go. This will result in a listing of dividends as they occurred thru that calendar year, nicely listed by date. I print that, to use when making the sheet I submit to the NTA for it--my sheet this year had a page and half of rows, tho that of course depends on formatting. The same thing works for interest, but that's simple since it's only once a month (twelve rows, not even a half page). I prefer to update my sheet for divvies 2-3 times thru the year, this year my last update was in november, so then come tax prep time it was all but done--only the final six weeks or so to complete.
You can also do a similar search/filter for trades, but that's less "clean" than when dealing with dividends, since if (e.g.) the 'buy' for something sold during 2022 did not also take place in 2022, you have to go look for it. But that 'history' tab also allows you to search by ticker symbol, so it's just a matter of clicking thru the same selection/search process to find the purchase date (or dates, for multiple lots to average the basis).
That's schwab, but I'd expect that other broker websites enable something similar.
All this is not hard, just some numbers paperwork to do, kind of like once upon a time keeping the checkbook balanced. For comparison, my wife and I have a monthly home budget that tracks expenses for various categories and what each of us spends, and all this is about on par with that. (tho the home budget is not official, so we sometimes fudge/eyeball the numbers a little, whereas for tax reporting, it's gotta be exact)
