So you have a US citizen married to a non-US citizen who doesn’t live or work in the USA, so how do you file federal taxes? Assume also the non-citizen spouse wants no part in getting a taxpayer ID or having their income taxed.
Supposedly you should not file as single since you aren’t, but to file married filing seperately it still asks for your spouses SS# and other stuff.
Is this a strange catch 22 or something?
EDIT: Ok like so:
Husband is French and living in France with French income and French taxes and doesn’t want a TID or to be on his wife’s income tax form.
So the way to do it above board is for the wife to file “married filing separately”, and for the husband to get an ITIN.
If the ITIN is the thing that the husband “doesn’t want”, then I’m not sure that there’s a way to file the wife’s return in a completely legal manner. I don’t think that having an ITIN requires the husband to file a U.S. tax return, though; see here. So far as I can tell, in this case it would just be a bureaucratic ID number.
It’s strange, though, that the IRS can require the husband to participate in the U.S. tax system in this way; I would think that they couldn’t have any standing to require him to do anything. Any legal types want to comment on the principles involved here?
Oh, and I guess the other way to avoid this impasse is for the wife to renounce her US citizenship. But that’s probably far more hassle than the husband getting an ITIN.