Five filing statuses
Generally, your filing status is based on your marital status on the last day of the year. You can choose:
Single if you’re unmarried, divorced or legally separated.
Married filing jointly if you’re married or if your spouse passed away during the year.
Married filing separately if you’re married and don’t want to file jointly or find that filing separately lowers your tax. Most couples save money by filing jointly.
Head of household if you’re single and you paid more than half of your living expenses for yourself and a qualifying dependent.
Qualifying surviving spouse if your spouse died during the past 2 years and you have a dependent child.
How filing status affects your tax filing
Filing status can affect:
Whether you must file a return
How much tax you owe
Credits you can claim
The type of form you should file
Your standard deduction amount
Whether you get a refund
What are the penalties for claiming the wrong filing status?
Sometimes tax payers who are not familiar with the different filing status when they self preparer or misadvised by a tax preparer, they may pick the filing status that yields the larger refund. Most commonly, married couples are mislead into filing separate returns as head of household each to get a large refund. When in fact, married couples are to file married filing separate unless they meet certain circumstances. Here are some of the penalties that a person is subject to for claiming the wrong filing status:
Failure to pay applies when you don’t pay the tax you owe by the due date.
Accuracy-related applies when you don’t claim all your income or when you claim deductions or credits for which you don’t qualify.
Erroneous claim for refund or credit penalty applies when you submit a claim for refund or credit of income tax for an excessive amount and reasonable cause does not apply.
Ban you from claiming EITC. You can’t claim the credits again for several years if we found that you previously tried to claim them against the rules. You can’t claim the credits for:
2 years after we made a final decision to reduce or deny your EITC due to reckless or intentional disregard of the rules
10 years after we made a final decision to reduce or deny your EITC due to fraud.
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