claiming child on tax return

Craig Edward Kennedy

When an Order of Child Support is drafted and signed by the Superior Court Judge or Commissioner, good family law counsel usually includes a provision to determine which party will take the child as a dependent for Federal (and state if you live in a state with a state income tax such as California or Oregon..) Income Tax purposes. Here, you've indicated your counsel left this matter out of your Orders...

So, this decision is now a matter of federal tax law. You and the other parent will now need to consult the IRS regulations and tax code to determine who gets to take the child 'off their taxes'.

Here's a helpful link to the IRS on this issue:

http://www.irs.gov/faqs/faq2-3.html

Finally, as you will notice from the IRS instructions on the link, payment of child support appears NOT to be the deciding factor for determining who takes the exemption.

I hope this helps!

Elizabeth Rankin Powell

Your order of child support should have a section dealing with who claims the child for federal tax purposes, and whatever it says is what the court ordered. Sometimes, the duty to pay support timely is a predicate condition to claiming the child as a tax exemption, sometimes it is not. Look at the order, see what it says. If you want to modify the order, that is a different problem. If you want to enforce the order because he isn't paying support timely, that can be done as a contempt motion, but you cannot add new language to the old decree, you have to ask to have the order modified if the language you want isn't there.

Hope that helps - Elizabeth Powell