IRS Spouse Protection Through Injured and Innocent Spouse Relief

There are many innocent spouses who find themselves in a tax fixes because of the negligence or carelessness of their partners. A spouse may find that they owe taxes and penalties for incomes they were not aware of. However, the IRS now has two programs to protect such innocent spouses. The Innocent Spouse program seeks to protect a spouse from tax obligations and penalties from engagements that they were not aware of. On the other hand, the Injured Spouse program enables a spouse to claim their rightful share of a tax refund.

Injured Spouse Program

Mortgage Life Insurance Leads Programs

The Injured Spouse program is the more popular of the two among Americans, mainly because many are not aware of the Innocent Spouse program and the benefits it poses. The Injured Spouse program basically enables a spouse toclaim for a full portion of a tax refund for debts deductions that he or she shouldered alone. In case one of the spouses has a house or a life insurance policy and they are seeking a tax refund for the mortgage relief or the premiums paid for the life insurance, then normally, such tax refunds are paid to both spouses if the tax refund was done jointly.

However, under this program, the spouse who has a direct claim to these refunds can use the Form 8379 to have the full refund forwarded to him or her. The form enables one to show the allocation of various incomes, deductions, and tax liabilities for jointly submitted returns. Through this Form 8379, they can explain why they feel they are due for all the refund. The claim can also be for a larger proportion of the tax refund basedon the nature of the refund claims. Using the Form 8379 to show proportional deductions on a joint return is better than spouse filing separately as separate returns will mean losing out on a lot of tax deductions that are due to joint returns.

Innocent Spouse Relief

The Innocent Spouse Relief is a very beneficial spouse protection program, especially owing to the high rate of divorces in the U.S. In fact, Congress is currently looking into reviewing the 2-year rule on the program, which gives taxpayers a 2 year window to apply for the relief. The Innocent Spouse Relief program is filed by a spouse who claims to have no prior knowledge of a tax problem that leads to penalties and other tax liabilities. For example, a spouse may have gotten some income in a given year and hideit from his or her partner and did not indicate the income in the joint tax returns. If the IRS caught up with the couple, the innocent spouse can claim tax liability exemption through the Innocent Spouse Relief program.

However, the spouse needs to prove that he or she was not aware or involved in any way with the tax problem. Such an innocent spouse needs to Form 8857 files out and explain their innocence. Currently, for a spouse to use this Innocent Spouse Relief, they will need to have filed the joint returns not more than 2 years from such claims. Besides this, they need to either be divorced or separated legally to claim this program or the non-innocent spouse needs to have died by the time of filing the Form 8857. Furthermore, the couple must have been separated at least oneyear from time of filing the Innocent Spouse Relief claim.

Claiming these programs is not as straight forward as is the case with most other tax issues. You may need the help of a tax expert to go about such a claim.

IRS Spouse Protection Through Injured and Innocent Spouse Relief