 Income tax 2023-2024, name and address, get ready and some coffee so we can avoid having to move into a shack by learning some income tax preparation 2023-2024. Most of this information can be found in the line instructions of the Form 1040 Instructions Tax Year 2023, which you can find on the IRS website at irs.gov, irs.gov, looking at the name and address, which seems fairly basic, fairly straightforward, but there are some nuances that we want to touch on and point out here, obviously. The IRS is going to want, when we fill out our tax return, our legal name, our address, and then they're going to want our identification number, typically our social security number, so that they can turn us into a number and then require that we're going to pay taxes, and if we don't pay taxes, they know where we live so they can come after us and make us okay. So the name and address, so you're going to print or type the information in the space provided if you are married, filing a separate return, enter your spouse's name in the entry space below the filing status, check boxes instead of below your name. In other words, at the top of the Form 1040, we're going to have the name information. If we're going to get into the filing statuses, if we're single, you would think we would just have one individual and not have a spouse, so we wouldn't be putting a name into the spouse's line item. However, if we're married, we might be able to choose to file married filing joint, which is the preferred filing status, typically, but we could choose married filing separately. If we choose married filing separately, we're still going to have our name as the primary taxpayer on the return, but then they still want the name of the spouse, typically, even though we're filing a separate return. First, a word from our sponsor. Yeah, actually, we're sponsoring ourselves on this one because apparently the merchandisers, they don't want to be seen with us, but that's okay, whatever, because our merchandise is better than their stupid stuff anyways. Like our, trust me, I'm an accountant product line. Yeah, it's paramount that you let people know that you're an accountant because apparently we're among the only ones equipped with the number crunching skills to answer society's current deep, complex, and nuanced questions. If you would like a commercial-free experience, consider subscribing to our website at accountinginstruction.com or accountinginstruction.thinkific.com and theoretically the spouse would then also have to file a return so that the IRS knows what's going on and can kind of mirror what is happening on their side from both people that are filing a married filing separate return. So tip, if you filed a joint return for 2022 and you are filing a joint return for 2023 with the same spouse, be sure to enter your names and social security numbers, which are abbreviated as SSNs whenever you see that in the same order as on your 2022 return. In other words, usually when you look at the tax return, you're going to have to list one name before the other name and traditionally that would be if you're married filing a joint, the husband would be the primary taxpayer and then the spouse would be also on the return, the second name on the return. If you flip the order of that and in the following year you put the spouse as the first name, primary taxpayer and then the other spouse as the second, you're going to confuse the IRS, your potentially and you don't want to confuse the IRS because when you do that, then that usually cause delays and problems. So you want to keep the ordering typically the same from year to year. So by the way, it doesn't really technically matter which spouse because if you're single, two single individuals get married, you're basically one legal entity for tax purposes, but obviously from a logistic standpoint, there's going to be, you're going to have to list one name and then the other and then the IRS is usually going to basically process the return, you would think by the first name that was filed on the tax return or at least the first social security number of the spouse on the tax return. Okay, what about a name change? If you change your name because of marriage, divorce, etc., be sure to report the change to the Social Security Administration, SSA before filing your return. So notice that when we, a lot of times when people think of a government entity, we kind of think as though they're all connected in one thing and they're not really, they all have their own thief stumps, right? Their own little areas that they're going to be operating in, especially there's going to be big differences between state and the federal government, although there could be communication between them. So clearly when you have a name change, you want to make sure you go through the process of changing the legal name and that's, you could do that oftentimes with the Social Security Administration, which also is part of in essence the federal government as opposed to the state government. And hopefully they will communicate that properly with the IRS, for example, so that when you try to file your return, it will process, which is something you can often see with these electronic filings because if you try to put a Social Security Number that does not line up to the name, it's possible that the electronic filing will kick back the return, will not recognize it and you'll run into a problem in which case you can try to figure that out and say, okay, there was a name change, was that processed properly and then figure out how you're going to deal with that from that point forward. Do you put in the name that you think the software will recognize? Do you try to change it with the Social Security Administration and then update the return and electronically file it later? Should you try to paper file it, which might take longer, but maybe processed in a paper filing type of situation? If you can't get the electronic file to go through because the Social Security Number doesn't seem to be processing. All right, so this prevents delays in processing your return and issuing refunds. So it also safeguards your future Social Security benefits, which is another key component, which isn't really part of the income tax. But remember that the Social Security is the place that if we make our name change, we want to make sure that they are properly tracking the amount of money that we are putting into the Social Security system. The Social Security system more and more these days acting like kind of a federal retirement program, as opposed to a safety net program. And therefore the money that we put into Social Security, typically withheld from our W-2 income in the form of payroll taxes, is going to affect the benefits we get at retirement if Social Security is still around when we retire, which I'm not betting on. But if it is, then we should get a larger benefit the more we pay into the Social Security. And so we want to make sure that we're getting the proper allocation of the money that we put into the system to our proper Social Security Number and so on so that we can maximize the benefits that we will get at retirement time. So address change. If you plan to move after filing your return, use Form 8822 to notify the IRS of your new address. So that becomes quite important, especially if you're having the IRS send you a check. If the IRS is sending you a check for a refund, then you want to make sure it goes to the right address. You can alleviate that problem to some degree by having an electronic transfer. Some people are still skeptical of an electronic transfer from the IRS because they have to give their banking information to their tax preparer or at the least put it into the tax software. But if you're comfortable with that, and a lot of people do it these days, electronic transfers are kind of the way it's going these days, then it might not be as urgent to make sure that your address is properly updated because you'll get your check electronically. But still, if there's a problem with any kind of return, the IRS will typically still use Snail Mail or the good old post office. I get stuff stolen over here all the time. So I'm not very happy with the whole system right now. I'm not very happy with it. But in any case, they're still going to go through that kind of long-term slow method. So you want to make sure that you're getting the notifications from the IRS so that you can properly respond to avoid the sticks that the penalties and interest sticks that they hit you with. So PO Box, enter your box number only if your post office doesn't deliver mail to your home. So foreign address, if you have a foreign address, enter the city name on the appropriate line. Don't enter any other information on that line, but also complete the spaces below that line. Don't abbreviate the country name. You don't want to confuse the IRS with these abbreviated country names. Follow the country's practice for entering the postal code and the name of the province, county or state. So obviously you want to be as clear as possible with the IRS using most likely the most formal kind of structure to make sure that they know where you're at. Death of a taxpayer. So if a taxpayer died before filing a return for 2023, the taxpayer's spouse or personal representative may have to file and sign a return for that taxpayer. So someone dies, right? If they die and they were married, well, we know with the filing status that the other spouse would still file, you would think as married filing joint. But you have a signature problem on it because when you sign the return, even if married, the one person has passed away, you would need their signature typically or technically, right? So you need to get authorization. If someone died and they were not married, then they probably still had income in the year of death and therefore need to close up and finish out the tax obligations, right? So there's only two things that are sure in life, death and taxes, right? And as we know, death is the sweet, sweet release from taxes, but you don't get released like right when you die. It takes a little bit of time before they stop picking your pockets. That's actually worse, right? After you die, they come after your corpse for a while. So that means that you got to... So you might have to have someone, of course, to sign the return to finish the job there. So a personal representative can be an executor, administrator, or anyone who is in charge of the deceased person's property. So that would depend upon who's in charge of it, if they have like a will, or if they didn't have a will as they're going through probate, if do they have a trust that might handle that type of situation? This touches in on tax planning, by the way, which is another whole area of itself, which becomes more and more important for higher income individuals so that they can try to stop the IRS from picking their corpse's body given a cavity search to see if they can get some cash out of it or something. But that's beyond our topic here. So if the deceased taxpayer didn't have to file a return, but had tax withheld, a return must be filed to get a refund. So clearly if there was withholding, you still got to file the return. So they had W-2 income. They withheld money from the W-2 income. They might not owe any tax in the year of death because they didn't earn as much money, but the money that they put into the government, even if you're below the threshold that you don't have to file in terms of income, you may want to because they may qualify for or they may need to get the refund of the money that was withholded from the W-2 income. So the person who files the return must enter deceased, the deceased taxpayer's name and the date of death across the top of the return. Most tax softwares has the capacity to kind of do that so that you can tell the IRS this person is deceased. If this information isn't provided, it may delay the processing. Why? Because the IRS is going to want that person's identification and signature and so on. If you're saying they're deceased, the IRS has to know that as basically a reason why someone else is processing or signing the return possibly. So if your spouse died in 2023 and you didn't remarry in 2023, it was nice of you to wait at least part of the year. So or if your spouse died in 2024 before filing a return for 2023, you can file a joint return. That's generally the idea, right? So if a spouse dies, you're married. We talked about this in the statuses. You're still typically going to file married filing joint in part because you were married for the part of the year that that individual died. Now, if you got married in the same year, that's a little weird. I mean, that's a little weird. I don't know. But if that happened, then maybe that wouldn't be the case because now you'd be married somewhere else which would be kind of unusual. But normally that would be the case. Okay, so a joint return should show your spouse's 2023 income before death and your income for all of 2023. Enter filing as surviving spouse in the area where you signed the return. So you still have the situation of saying, I'm filing married filing joint, but my spouse died and therefore I have this signature problem to have the spouse sign the return. So if someone else is in the personal representative, they must also sign. So all pairs of income, including financial institution, should be promptly notified of the taxpayer's death. This will ensure proper reporting of income earned by the taxpayer's estate or heirs. In other words, when someone dies, then they still could be earning income because although they're not going to get earned income from a W-2 job, you would think. You might want to notify the job, say they're not coming in tomorrow, but they might get income from like dividend income, investment income, and so on and so forth. So all of the income sources that they might be receiving, you don't want them going to the social security number of the person that died in the following year, in this case, 2024, because that means that's going to cause you tax problems because you can't, because the income should be assigned to someone who's living, so if they had a will, it might go through probate, it might be in their estate, for example, if there's tax planning, there might be a trust involved, like a marital trust. Again, that kind of goes beyond what we're really diving into here, but it's an interesting area of itself that a tax preparer often touches in on, that being basically tax planning for death, like estate planning and that kind of thing. So a deceased taxpayer's social security number shouldn't be used for tax years after the year of death, except for estate tax return purposes.