Filing taxes?

[ya hayat alby ♥ 0]

Hello MENA! So sorry I haven't been active on here for awhile. My school started again and I haven't had a lot of time lately.

So its that time of year again... tax time. Quite frankly I've never filed my taxes as married, haha. I tried to e-file like usual, but it won't let me go past the page where I enter K's information because he does not have a SSN right now.

Do you know how you file if your spouse is not a US citizen/doesn't have a SSN number? Am I not supposed to file with him? I'm pretty sure I'm supposed to file as married since well... I am. I'm just worried because I heard before that another MENA lady had problems at her hubby's visa interview because her hubby wasn't on her taxes or something along those lines.

I would wait until he got his SSN... but it would most likely be cutting it really close to the date that taxes are due and I need to submit my FAFSA by March 1st anyways.

Any help would be appreciated...!

[NancylovesAhmad 1]

You can apply to get a tax identification number which is form W-7 if im not mistaken and that will be the number you input for his social. I am also in the process of filing my taxes and will be going next week to get a tax id number for my husband so that we can also file married filing jointly.

Hopefully there is someone else in this forum that can give us more information on the process. I just know the tax id info from another forum that I read it on. So glad you started this topic.

[Vanessa1 7]

I actually went in to my local IRS office and asked them about this. They said that there were two choices. First, as Nancy said, you can apply for the tax ID number and file the status "Married, filing jointly". The second option is to file "Married, filing separately" and then when your husband gets here, if you choose, you can ammend the return or you can just leave it as is. The benefit of filing jointly is that it should save you money on the tax tables. The difficulty we ran into was trying to figure out what income counts or does not count and how to show it and what to report. There's some sort of term like global income or international income or something like that. At the IRS office they basically said that I have to go to a tax professional to figure that out and when my husband and I discussed it we thought it would be easier at this point to just do the "Married, filing separately" option. All of his proof of income stuff is in another language, we'd have to pay to have it translated, etc. But now that you bring that up as being a concern at the interview we may have to rethink. UGH!

[ya hayat alby ♥ 0]

I called the IRS about applying for an ITIN and they want a certified copy of his passport from Egypt... my question is, where does he take his passport copy to get certified? The IRS had no idea since it was the Egyptian government...

[New Beginnings 32]

he would need to take it to the Embassy to have them certify it

[Y's_habibitk 2]

You dont have to file married, unless you really want to if he is not living here with you.

I filed HOH last year as Y wasnt here, it didnt cause any problems with his interview. This comes up every year and there are a million threads about it on VJ. I think I finally just saved the IRS page to favorites for this occasion

yep:

http://www.irs.gov/publications/p504/ar02....ublink100044128

There is an exception for non resident alien spouses. Its being "considered unmarried"

If you do want to file married, then the above advise is right on!

Good Luck

Edited February 10, 2010 by Y's_habibitk