Special Test For A Qualifying Child Of More Than One Person (Tiebreaker Rules)

Access Leading Tax Experts And Technology
In Our Global Digital Marketplace

Written by Milton Boothe | Posted in Individual • Tax Deductions

If more than one taxpayer could claim your child, that is, if the child meets the relationship, age, residence, and support test for you and another person(s), tax law allows only ONE person to claim the child as a qualifying child.

You and the other person(s) will therefore have to agree on who will claim the child for a particular year. If you and the other person(s) cannot agree on who will claim the child, the IRS tiebreaker rules will then come into effect, and will decide who will claim the child. The tiebreaker rules state that:

• If only one of the persons is the child’s parent, the child is the qualifying child of the parent.
• If two of the persons are parents of the child and they do not file a joint return together, the child is the qualifying child of the parent with whom the child lived for the longer period of time during the year.
• If the two persons are parents of the child and they do not file a joint return together, and the child lived with each parent the same amount of time during the year, the child is the qualifying child of the parent with the highest adjusted gross income.
• If none of the persons are the child’s parents, only the person with the highest AGI can treat the child as a qualifying child.

The primary objective of this article is to empower taxpayers to learn to do their own taxes. For more information on how to claim your exemptions, grab yourself a copy of “Doing Your Own Taxes is as Easy as 1, 2, 3,” ($6.98) on TaxConnections.com.

Milton Boothe

Milton G Boothe is an IRS Enrolled Agent with over twenty years of tax and financial accounting experience, including several years at PricewaterhouseCoopers. He is also a British certified Chartered Accountant. He is currently employed in private tax practices where he helps people resolve their tax problems, minimize their taxes, and routinely represents the interests of taxpayers before the Internal Revenue Service. As an Enrolled Agent (EA) Boothe is a federally-authorized tax practitioner who has technical expertise in the field of taxation and who is empowered by the U.S. Department of the Treasury to represent taxpayers before all administrative levels of the IRS for audits, collections, and appeals.
Milton G Boothe is also the author of several tax publications, wherein he encourages people to empower themselves by learning to do their own taxes.