I recently started selling covered calls and was curious how USA taxes for premium collected on unassigned covered calls worked. I was under the impression that such premiums will classify as short-term gains but this link (https://www.streetauthority.com/16452/use-this-strategy-to-save-thousands-on-your-taxes/) says that we can use it to lower cost basis and defer the tax on premium to the time when we actually sell the underlying shares. Can someone shed some light on this?
I tried searching more on this over past few days and haven't come across any IRS provision like this. I know the broker's platform doesn't change the actual cost basis of the underlying so seems like even if this was possible I would need to somehow manually track this. Any insights are appreciated.