Form 8606 utility-

Hello Alan, et.al.
Perhaps I am the Poster Child for maligned Form 8606; I have reviewed my complete IRA contribution history struggling to arrive at a defensible Non Deductible Basis. You were right, it was a miserable research project. 3 separate accountants (3 epochs of my life-single/ married/ business), each with an error which has compounded over time. Not the compounding I am working towards…
This has become an issue since initiating a SOLO 401K and transferring the value of pretax earnings and those early deductible contributions; my intent is isolating tIRA Basis for a rIRA conversion.
I now realize Roth contributions have been co-mingled with my ND tIRA contributions on a few recent Form 8606.

Are ROTH IRA Contributions tracked on page 1 of FORM 8606?
My impression is that the utility of FORM 8606 is tracking NonDeductible tIRA contributions.

Where are ROTH Contributions tracked?

Thank-you for your consideration.
Regards,
tomtom



Form 8606 is used to report Roth IRA distributions, but never contributions.

If you filed prior 8606 forms that included Roth contributions in with the non deductible TIRA contributions, you need to revise those forms. The IRS has not been charging a penalty for retroactive 8606 filing to document basis, but that does not apply when you overstate your basis. Therefore, you should correct the overstatements ASAP.

For Roth IRA regular contributions, you have to track them yourself. Both you and the IRS receive Form 5498 every year showing your Roth (or other IRA) contributions. You should either keep those forms permanently with your tax files or with your IRA files. But to always know where your Roth IRA stands with respect to the balance of regular contributions and conversions, I prefer a tally sheet starting with your first Roth contribution year. 1998 was the first possible year to contribute to a Roth IRA.

That sheet should show each year in the left column, the next column shows the amount of your regular contributions (reduced by any excess contributions you removed), next column conversion amounts, and last column distributions. If you want to have this completely up to date, you could add columns to show your cumulative total of regular contributions and conversions. If you ever take an early Roth distribution, one glance will tell you the figures you need to report on Form 8606 for Roth distributions (see first line in this post). At any point in time your Roth earnings are simply the amount of your Roths that exceeds the contributions totals.

You don’t need this sheet if you are sure that you will never need to take an early distributions. Once you reach 59.5 and 5 years for the Roth, you no longer need to report distributions on Form 8606 and will no longer need the sheet. But if you took early distributions in the last 5 years, keep the sheet for about 5 years in the event the IRS inquires about your reporting of those early distributions.



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