Form 6252 change for 2019

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Form 6252 for 2019 requires that the sale price and basis of the installment sale be entered.  In the case of a long-ago sale, this information is often not available.  What is the acceptable work-around when the original 6252 cannot be obtained?

[Just-Lisa-Now-]

This is why people should never toss out the tax returns themselves...you never know when they might come in handy!

Ive had 2 clients dig them up from the depths of their records this year..one found the paperwork from the sale and we could recreate it, the other found the 2010 Form 6252.

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Most clients work with the 7-8 years guideline.  A few are aware of keeping asset basis records. None, including us, were aware that 6252 sales figures were to be required after the original year of sale.  In these cases the sales were over 25 years ago, in the early nineties.  That's asking a lot to keep records that long. Other older clients have sales in excess of twenty years ago. That is again in my opinion, asking too much for them to keep records that long.  Aged 70s-90+s, even if they kept them, they might  well be challenged to find them.

[Just-Lisa-Now-]

No amortization schedule that shows the original figures?

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Unfortunately the amortization schedule we received in one case starts with 2014 figures, and the sale was in 2005.  A further complication is that payments have not been completely regular.  It would be nice if ProSeries would allow a dummy figure to be entered if the original info is not available.  I have heard a workaround is to just enter $100K as the sale and an appropriate basis figure to yield the established cap gain percentage. Hmm.

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We determined that entering zeroes into the selling price and basis fields results in no error flag and no change in the carried over 6252 percentage capital gain for ProSeries 2019.  That is probably a more honest way of handling the situation than entering faked figures.  We would also add a statement to the return indicating that those original figures are not available and substitution has been made.

[TAXATION]

Yes, found out after posting the question.  Thank you very much for the reply  

Why it has to be entered after year of sale will not be answered by the IRS.  Thought if reentering the info would have an effect   But, no, just for info purposes I guess.

The original installment happened in 1999.  No problem since I bought a Fujitsu scanner from Intuit about 7-8 years ago ($800+) and scanned all the paper files (18 years worth) on external flash drives and sold the file cabinets.  Can provide clients prior years returns for a price.

Best investment was the scanner back then.