Wash sale rule for Treasuries

[jason]

Hello everyone,

I liquidated my old non-PP portfolio when I set up my PP in June, and that caused me to incur a large short term gain from my old portfolio.  Since then, the Treasuries in my PP have lost about 10% of their value.  I would like to sell my Treasuries to lock in the short term loss so I can off-set the short term gains from my old portfolio.  My CPA says there is no way to know for sure, but he believes if I swap out my 30 year Treasuries for 29 year Treasuries, the wash sale rule should not be a problem.  I have been unable to find any information to support my CPA's opinion.  I definitely don't want to wait 30 days before I buy new Treasuries in order to avoid a wash sale.  I am also not interested in buying TLT for 30 days because I don't want to get stuck with a short term gain in the event TLT has a gain over the 30 days.  I really want to do an instant Treasury "swap", if at all possible, where I sell my Treasuries and immediately buy Treasuries that have a maturity date as close to 30 years as possible, but without running afoul of the wash sale rule.  I called the IRS and they didn't have any useful information.  Does anyone have any information on how far apart the maturity dates of two Treasuries need to be in order to not be considered substantially identical under the wash sale rule? 

Thanks!
Jason

[Pointedstick]

Sounds like your accountant is probably going to wind up having a more definitive answer than anything we can provide. After all, this is the IRS we're talking about; while we're all guessing, at least with your CPA, you can say you were acting on the advice of a professional if you run into trouble.

Could you maybe swap your bonds fro 30-year zero-coupon bonds and then swap them back after 30 days?

[Reub]

I think that you would be on firm ground there. 29 years is NOT identical to 30.

[ns2]

Interesting thing here is that with Fidelity I just point and click and everything gets imported into my tax return. So the bottom line here is what did the CPA's tell the programmers to program into the system and are they correct and did the programmers do it right? Being a computer professional I kind of have the attitude of live by the computer, die by the computer, but also being a computer professional I also agree with the adage that if you really want to F**K things up, you need a computer.