rights to claim a dependent in SC, child tax exemption

I do not know the answer for SC taxes. The IRS answer is below. This is taken from IRS Publication 501. A link is attached if you want to see that publication for more information.

There are five tests that must be met for a child to be a qualifying child on a federal tax return. The five tests are:

Relationship, Age, Residency, Support, and Special test for qualifying child of more than one person. The two that seem most applicable to your situation are relationship and the special test.

Relationship Test
To meet this test, a child must be:

1) Your son, daughter, stepchild, foster child, or a descendant (for example, your grandchild) of any of them, or

2) Your brother, sister, half brother, half sister, stepbrother, stepsister, or a descendant (for example, your niece or nephew) of any of them.

Note that there is nothing in this rule about how to demonstrate this relationship. Your child is his daughter so he qualifies under this test. Basically the IRS takes people's word for it until challenged (such as someone else submits a tax return claiming the same child).

Special Test for Qualifying Child of More Than One Person


If your qualifying child is not a qualifying child for anyone else, this test does not apply to you and you do not need to read about it. This is also true if your qualifying child is not a qualifying child for anyone else except your spouse with whom you file a joint return.



If a child is treated as the qualifying child of the noncustodial parent under the rules for children of divorced or separated parents described earlier, see Applying this special test to divorced or separated parents, later.

Sometimes, a child meets the relationship, age, residency, and support tests to be a qualifying child of more than one person. Although the child is a qualifying child of each of these persons, only one person can actually treat the child as a qualifying child. To meet this special test, you must be the person who can treat the child as a qualifying child.

If you and another person have the same qualifying child, you and the other person(s) can decide which of you will treat the child as a qualifying child. That person can take all of the following tax benefits (provided the person is eligible for each benefit) based on the qualifying child.

The exemption for the child.

The child tax credit.

Head of household filing status.

The credit for child and dependent care expenses.

The exclusion from income for dependent care benefits.

The earned income credit.

The other person cannot take any of these benefits based on this qualifying child. In other words, you and the other person cannot agree to divide these tax benefits between you.

If you and the other person(s) cannot agree on who will claim the child and more than one person files a return claiming the same child, the IRS will disallow all but one of the claims using the tie-breaker rule in Table 6. See the link for this table.