Tax question -- Community property

Artereis

My taxes are a little weird this year due to my divorce. Since it's not legally finalized this yet, we're filing separately. California, however, is a community property state. I need to report half of her income on my own return. The help file for the service I'm using only mentions editing box 1, but I feel like I should be changing at least box 2 as well. Anyone able to verify this for me?

localh77

I guess I wonder what you mean by "editing box 1". Are you preparing your 1040 manually? If so, then yeah, I believe you generally split the wages in box 1 of the W-2 along with the withholding in box 2.

But if you're using some sort of tax prep software, I'm thinking it should let you put in a W-2 and somehow market as community property, so that it automatically gets split. And I would think it would also automatically create a populated version of Form 8958 to attach to your return.

Artereis

The service that I normally use doesn't actually let you input a spouse's W2 if you've set it to married filing separately. You need to just enter different values for your own W2 and then populate the 8958 form at the end.

localh77

Interesting. Yeah, in that case, I would split both boxes 1 and 2. I'm pretty sure all of the Social Security and Medicare (boxes 3 - 6) all go to the working spouse.

The main thing, though, is to coordinate with your spouse to make sure the total claimed on each box matches the W-2. Even if it's technically not the right answer, if they wanted to take all of the withholding for example, depending on the amount, it might be easier to just let them take it all, rather than basically guaranteeing a letter from the IRS after they match things up.