Hi folks! OK, this is probably the stupidest state incme tax question ever, but please bear with me - I only lived in one state until last year so this is all new to me.
ANYWAY, last year I moved from GA to NC on January 11th. I received one paycheck from my old GA company for working January 1-8th. I started working at a company here in NC on January 15th. and worked there until January 31st of this year.
So my question is this: do I only need to grab an “EZ” GA form and do my GA taxes off my 1 GA W2? Or do I have to do “declare” my W2 from NC, even though I was no longer a GA resident when I started that job?
I ask because I’m using Turbo Tax for the Web, which only supports one federal and one state return. I’m hoping that the GA taxes will be a 10 minute ordeal, but I wanna make sure.
(Please keep in mind that this is just a non-educated guess. I could be way the hell off here, since I’ve only ever had jobs in PA.)
You have to pay taxes to whatever state you lived in at the time you earned the money. Thus, GA taxes for the GA W-2 and NC taxes for the NC W-2. You should be able to grab a GA-EZ (or whatever it’s called) form off the Web and fill it out; there may be a box you can check saying that you no longer live in the state so they don’t bug you next year.
On the upside, you probably didn’t make enough in that week to be required to pay GA taxes. So you just might get a small return from them.
Someone who knows taxes will probably be along shortly to tell me what an idiot I am, but this all sounds reasonable to me.
(a) in the place of your residence
(b) in the state where you earned the money (certain conditions of materiality apply)
In your example, you need to file two state returns since you resided in two states. Given the short time of your employment in one state, I would file online with the other.
Many people working in Manhatten and living in, say, New Jersey have a lot of fun every year. They are theoretically required to file in both, and the NJ return can often b e summarized as 'I didn’t earn any money here, but over there. Then I was taxes there, not over here. Hence, I don’t owe New Jersey anything". Big PIA I heard
Ok, I had to do this in tax year 2002 and tax year 1999. It was a nightmare for me last year, by the way. BUT, IANAAccountant or a tax professional.
You do not get to use a GA 500EZ, because you were technically a part-year resident, so you get to use GA 500. You can get these through http://www.gatax.org
You do have to declare your entire year’s earnings, but then you have to figure what percentage of your income was actually earned in Georgia. If NC has income tax, there’s probably a part-year option for their tax forms as well. The GA should be less complicated than the NC, so I’d probably do the NC online and the GA by hand.