This guide tells you how to download all the necessary Stock Plan Confirmations for your stock plan.
The data on all these documents is necessary to correctly calculate the average acquisition cost for shares that you have sold, if you for example did some same-day-sales but didn't sell all your shares.
Unfortunately, ETrade doesn’t provide any bulk download of PDF files. With the method described here, the manual work needed is however reduced to a minimum.
How to find the PDF files?
Log in to https://us.etrade.com/etx/hw/v2/accountshome.
Expand the Quick links and click Stock plan confirmations.
On the Stock Plan Confirmations page:
Select Custom date as Year, and select the longest possible date range.
For Benefit Type, select Restricted Stock first. This will download confirmation documents for your vested Restricted Stock Units (RSUs) - if you have any.
After completing all the steps, you will repeat the steps and select Stock Options here on the second iteration. This will download documents for your stock option exercises - if you have any.
Note: Depending on your ESOP incentive mix selection, you may have a mix of one or more of RSUs, Stock Options, or Cash Grants. If you have selected 100% cash, do not expect to see any documents for other types of compensation. ESPP, Performance Stock, and Stock Appreciation Rights are potentially relevant to your personal situation too. If you don't know, ensure that you see no such documents when you filter on them in the form.
Click on Apply, and then click on View All to see all the documents.
Remember to click View All - otherwise you will miss important documents.
Pay close attention if you download the PDFs manually - don't accidentally miss any Download link.
Count the downloaded PDFs and ensure the number of files match the total number seen under your table.
We have in the past relied on Multi-File Downloader to bulk download all the PDFs instead of having to manually download each PDF. We have also linked to the following JavaScript which would download all the files into an archive in your download folder. After an update on ETrade's site, none of these work anymore.
You can manually download each file instead - no problem. Just make sure not to miss any document.
Confirm that the number of files downloaded is the same as the number displayed on the webpage at the bottom of the table.
Next Steps
Repeat the steps above for each Stock Plan Confirmation document type that you need. (Typically: Restricted Stock and Stock Options). You can save all of them to the same sub-folder or keep them in separate folders.
Confirm that you find the PDFs for your Restricted Stock and Stock Options in the Downloads folder, and verify that the number of files are what you expect.
If you don't already have all your Trade Confirmation documents downloaded, check How to download Trade Confirmations from ETrade.
Upload all documents to Skatteguru and have your K4 form automatically generated for you when it's time to declare your taxes.
If you have owned shares via other brokers in addition to ETrade or if you owned shares before the first date available in ETrade, you can still use Skatteguru but will need to also import the other trades using the Skatteguru CSV format.