You poor tax people must be keeping pretty busy. (One bonus of having stayed away from taxes. :-) It was bad enough when I was still doing taxes for small businesses.)

I have been avoiding these mutual funds I sold, but have to eventually deal with it. It's the only thing holding me up.

My 1099-B is including a yearly account maintenance fee as a distribution. While I understand that theoretically, it's like removing the money from the fund, paying me, and then me paying it back to them for the fees, it's not a "sale."

If it counts as a sale anyway, I would think I'd be able to in some fashion deduct these fees. i.e. add to the basis or something. But I can't find any info anywhere about it. I can find info on commissions and redemption fees, etc. the type of thing that adds to basis or reduces the net sale proceeds. I can also find certain items that can only be itemized, such as accounting fees, legal fees, fees for investment advice, that type of thing.

But nowhere can I find how a yearly maintenance fee is handled. If this is a normal way to handle this (i.e. deducted fees are now a sale), then you'd think this would be mentioned in the mutual fund publication.

Despite that I'm screaming inside that it doesn't seem fair, my gut is logically saying it's included in the itemized category, cause it's like a fee for "handling my investment," which is sort of related to accounting fees and such. Is this correct? (I haven't totaled it yet, but I don't think I can itemize.)

The annual maintenance fee can only be deducted as an itemized miscellaneous deduction.