Dependent Exemption Divorced Spouses

by KYW's Amy Feldman

You know how when your kid is behaving badly, you turn to your spouse and say, “Your son is behaving horribly?”  But when tax season comes around, divorced spouses both want to claim the little menace as their own for the purposes of the dependency exemption.  Can both claim the same kid?  If not, who gets the benefit? 

For purposes of the dependency exemption, one child can be claimed as a dependent on one tax form.  So if you’re married filing jointly—no problem.  But in order to figure out which divorced spouse gets to claim him, the IRS has a test:  if only one person is the parent, the parent gets to claim him.  If both are the parents, the parent with whom the child lived for the longer period of time gets the exemption.  If the child lived with each parent for the same amount of time, then the child will be treated as a dependent of the parent with the higher adjusted gross income.  Too bad that’s not the test when the question is:  who gets to change the diaper?