Capital gains and lost paper trail

Gudrun

Hello, I'd be grateful for some advice.   My husband has made some capital gains on shares.   However the original sums were invested over 25 years ago.   They have passed through multiple brokers and he does not have a record  going back so far.   What should  he do?

Mark_d

You only need to do anything if the capital gain is above the allowance

Reaper

If the amounts are small you can simply declare the purchase price as zero on your self assessment (if you need to do one) when you come to sell them. However that only works if the amount you raise from sales each tax year is less than the capital gains allowance (£3,000 currently)

Gudrun

Thank you all for your comments.

My husband has a rough idea how much he invested originally, and yes he does need to do a tax self-assessment.   He does not have bank statements going back 25 years.   If he sells shares this year he will go over the £3,000 allowance.

I think he probably needs to talk to HMRC about all this, but thank you again for your thoughts.

wmb194

Gudrun said:

Thank you all for your comments.

My husband has a rough idea how much he invested originally, and yes he does need to do a tax self-assessment.   He does not have bank statements going back 25 years.   If he sells shares this year he will go over the £3,000 allowance.

I think he probably needs to talk to HMRC about all this, but thank you again for your thoughts.

Does he have a good idea of the year in which they were purchased? If so, Google the share price chart and pick a figure that appears believable. To maximise the gain he could pick the lowest price the share traded in the year. I doubt anyone would complain about this approach.

vacheron

Gudrun said:

Thank you all for your comments.

My husband has a rough idea how much he invested originally, and yes he does need to do a tax self-assessment.   He does not have bank statements going back 25 years.   If he sells shares this year he will go over the £3,000 allowance.

I think he probably needs to talk to HMRC about all this, but thank you again for your thoughts.

You say in your first post "he made gains", but in the above "If he sells shares he will go over"

Have these shares actually been sold? 

If not, will his gains be over £6,000? If not, he can gift half of the shares to you, and you can sell them using your GCT allowance (providing you haven't used yours for anything else). 

Gudrun

Thank you James, wmb194, and vacheron, for the good advice and ideas.   I will try to remember to come back to this thread when eventually all this is resolved.

The gifting idea is interesting, vacheron, we hadn't thought of that.   Sorry I was unclear in my original post - I meant that he was pretty sure he would go over the CGT limit if he sold shares this year.