[GNC] IRA/401K income detection

[David G. Pickett]

Lots of fun interest here!  Not exactly looking for accounting advice, except how to properly encode this well understood activity so it generates a tax report item.

Michael D Novack seems to be hinting how to do this, creating the 100% pretax IRA/401K account in equity and, assuming it is already in existence when you start GNUCash, using deferred income not opening balance to load it with money and stocks.  Can you add stocks as deferred income?  I guess, just a different currency!  As dividends arrive, they need to be characterized as deferred income, too, even though they get used to buy more shares.

So we are chugging along, but now I get to distributions.  When I move money from the IRA to the bank account, if I do it without a 4-split, it is just a transfer and of no interest to the tax report, never mind being characterized as income.  I am actually happy if it just hits the tax report, as transfers as a 2-split are just between 2 net worth accounts.  Will that happen, or would that be some kind of enhancement: a band aid  over the limits of the double entry bookkeeping system?  The 4-split seems a pretty crude thing, and especially ugly if it gets mangled out of balance in some update!

Can we devise a GNUCash programatic enhancement of the double entry bookkeeping system that sees such transfers from a deferred tax account to a not deferred tax account also as taxable income (and the reverse as tax sheltered, negative income), or automatically move the money via an appropriate 4-split?  Can we lock the automatic 4-split so it cannot be mangled out of balance?