"Any other suggestions?"

Has anyone asked the IRS for 1040 transcripts? The 1099-Misc transcript will be "interesting" but not comprehensive.

I had to do this for my father, a Lacerte preparer that hadn't done his own return for 2 years, but kept doing client's returns. I had to pay three banks to get historic statements of his accounts and he had 13 credit cards in use, so I gathered paperwork for months. Fortunately, as a pretty good computer user, he had one file with a listing of access and passwords for accounts and financial institutions that pointed us to where he had holdings. Also, over the course of 6 months or so, you get their mail, which reveals a lot. If nothing else, they typically stash paperwork somewhere.

I did this for my grandmother, as well, and it went very differently. She got ill in Aug and died the next Jan. From that Aug on, I kept asking if I should help with that prior year's tax return, which had been put on extension by her CPA, as well as help get ready for the current year. She didn't want me to get involved. So, when she died in the year she died, there was no activity for reporting on taxes and I wasn't responsible for the fact that the year before was never filed. I later got a letter from the IRS, as did one of my friends whose mother also died that year. The woman died owning no real property, no retirement, hardly any funds in checking, and the IRS letter told us she owed them over $275,000. I responded with the detail info for the year of death and that no one alive is responsible for her not filing that prior year.