I'd recommend the following educational activity for your club:

1. Have each person take 1 of your investments and so some research on these questions:

2. Is the investment listed on the bivio Before You Invest page as one that might cause accounting and tax reporting problems for your club?

3. How easy is it to find information about the company? Do they have a good, informative website? What is the investor relations section of their website like?

4. Do they have a tax section in their investor relations section?

5. Does it indicate how tax information is conveyed to you? Do they issue K-1's?

6. Do they have any Form 8937's listed somewhere on their website describing actions that have impacted the cost basis of their stock? These could be things like reorganizations (splits, spinoffs, mergers etc.) or end of year reclassification of dividends. Here are examples of some of them that we have helped clubs address over the past year: Cost Basis Adjustment Information

7. If your investment is an ETF, mutual fund or REIT, where do you go to find the description of the taxable categories for each of the distributions ("dividends") you received during the year?

8. You will find that some companies provide tax information in a much better way than others. Those with good tax related communications will be much easier for you to own if some sort of taxable event comes up. How would you rate the availability of information from your company?

9. Can you sign up for news releases from the company? If so, your stock watcher should do that. If a company is going to go through a reorganization that will impact your taxes, they will usually release information about it far in advance of it happening. That gives you time to ask questions and get rid of the stock if it looks like it might bring complicated tax issues you don't think you'll want to deal with.