Alert about security type, country, taxes
When buying a company for the first time, you may see a message asking to review Security Type and Country:
Note: This security appears to be new to the club portfolio. Please review the Security Type and Country in Security Settings to make sure that they are correct. If the Security Type or Country is incorrect, the club's tax filings may not be accurate.
All this means is that the club has never owned this security before (at least not under this ticker symbol), and because the IRS has started asking for more information about investments on tax forms, we want to make sure the club double-checks they type and Country that we have listed for the security.
If you see this message, changing the listed country for a security, requires a few steps.
- First, if you aren't sure whether the company is foreign or domestic, or if you want to check what country it is based in:
- Go to Accounting > Securities
- Click the small myICLUB logo next to the ticker symbol of any security listed there. The site will take you to a Stock Quotes/Information page
- On this page, check the company information section and note which country is named next to the Domiciled entry; that's the country we suggest to use. Some companies may have a different entry for Primary Business or Headquarters. Primary business can be ignored in this case, since it is only a measure of where the company reports most of their earnings are coming from. Headquarters may seem like a good choice, but ICLUBcentral's Doug Gerlach offers the following advice:
Usually, determining which country to choose will be very straightforward, but there are many countries that offer advantages to corporations and are used for registration by many businesses, so this can cloud the answer to the question “where is a company located?” for reporting on IRS forms. For instance, many “Chinese” corporations are incorporated in the Cayman Islands though they have little or no operations in that country. For this reason we suggest using the country listed next to the 'Domiciled' entry.
Once you have determined the correct country:
- Go to Accounting > Securities > Update security settings.
- Click the Pencil/Edit button next to the security you need to change.
- Click the Country drop-down menu, under the Advanced Settings heading, to see a list of all available countries.
- Find and click the correct country, then click the *Submit* button, to save that change.