Opinions on an odd tax situation

My mother died 4ish years ago, leaving a couple of IRAs to be divided among her kids. I’ve been taking minimum distributions based on my life expectancy - a couple hundred dollars a year.

One of them was a CD that expired 4 months ago. Rather than letting the bank roll it over into something that locked it at 2 percent for the next 5 years, I opted to put it in a money market account at the same bank while I thought about it. I said, specifically, that I wanted this to remain as an IRA and continue taking the minimum distributions in the future.

So today I open the mail, and see a 1099-R from the bank for the couple hundred.

An another, for the whole IRA balance.

Yep - they treated it as if I’d withdrawn the whole shebang.

This is a rather co$tly bank error - to the tune of about 6 grand due to the way they coded it (see below; if they’d coded it differently I’d only be out 4500. yay.).

What do you think the odds are of getting them to fix it retroactively?

Also - on the expected 1099-R, the “distribution code” says 4 (which means “due to death”). On the unexpected one, the code says 1 (distribution before age 59 1/2). Shouldn’t this one also be “death”? Anyone else ever run into that sort of thing (withdrawing entire inherited IRA balance)?

Contact them and see. I’m sure they’ll amend things to fix the mistake.

I agree with RealityChuck, contact the bank.

A similar situation occured to me a few years ago. I quit working at a company and they sent me a check for the balance of my 401k. I turned it over to a broker (without cashing it) who rolled it into an IRA.

I later got a notice from the IRS saying I owed taxes, penalties and interest on the entire amount of the 401k roll-over check. I checked with the broker and they had typed the wrong Social Security number on form they sent to the IRS. Therefore the IRS did not match up the paperwork from the 401k people and the IRA broker so they figured I kept the cash.

The broker wrote a letter detailing the error, which I sent to the IRS, and everything was settled.