 death of a taxpayer. So if a taxpayer died before filing a return for 2023, the taxpayer 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 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. It'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 had 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 you, which you is another whole area in and of itself, which becomes more and more important for higher income individuals so that they can, so that they can, you know, try to stop the iris from picking their corpses body for, you know, 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 you've, you had, they had W2 income, they withheld money from the W2 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, to 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 W2 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 iris this person is deceased. If this information isn't provided, it may delay the processing. Why? Because the iris is going to want that person's identification and signature and so on. If you're saying they're deceased, the iris 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 like 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 payers of income, including financial institutions 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 all the they still could be earning income, right? Because although they're not going to get earned income from a W2 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 a 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.