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Claiming a dependent is usually pretty simple: you give the IRS their social security number, and claim that your relationship with your dependent satisfies a few simple rules. But things can get more complicated: someone else can also claim the same person as a dependent, and if they get their filing in first, the IRS will assume it’s legitimate. What can you do then?

The process is fairly straightforward. An efiled return claiming a dependent who has already been claimed will be rejected, but a paper return will move things to the next step: the IRS will request that both filers demonstrate how they satisfy the criteria for claiming a dependent.

Criteria for Claimin a Dependent

Straight from the IRS website, here are the rules for claiming a dependent:

1. **Relationship** — the taxpayer’s child or stepchild (whether by blood or adoption), foster child, sibling or stepsibling, or a descendant of one of these.

2. **Residence** — has the same principal residence as the taxpayer for more than half the tax year. Exceptions apply, in certain cases, for children of divorced or separated parents, kidnapped children, temporary absences, and for children who were born or died during the year.

3. **Age** — must be under the age of 19 at the end of the tax year, or under the age of 24 if a full-time student for at least five months of the year, or be permanently and totally disabled at any time during the year.

4. **Support** — did not provide more than one-half of his/her own support for the year.

If you can demostrate that the dependent fits these criteria for you (and thus no one else), write up the reasons and mail them in with your tax return.

The IRS can’t tell you who else has claimed the dependent, for several reasons: one is that since they don’t know who made the right claim, they don’t want to violate the privacy of someone who really is claiming their own child. Another is that there’s always the potential for mistakes, and it doesn’t make much sense to punish someone for accidentally writing a “4″ that looks like a “9″ when copying a social security number.

Why Dependents Require a Social Security Number

For a while, this wasn’t the problem: the IRS used to more or less take the taxpayer’s word for it when they claimed dependents. But in 1987, the rule changed to require taxpayers to give a social security number for every dependent they claimed. And suddenly, seven million dependents disappeared. Many of them were probably due to misunderstandings: two divorced parents each claiming all of their kids, for example. But others could have been due to shady behavior, including claiming children while knowing someone else would claim them, or even fabricating dependents entirely.

Contesting a Claim, in Short

Prepare your filing the way you normally would, but instead of e-filing, print it out. Write up a cover letter, covering how your dependent claim satisfies the criteria of relationship, residence, age, and support, and then mail the letter and the filing to the IRS. In most cases, that will settle things. If not, the IRS will audit you and the other person, at which point it makes sense to begin working with a tax attorney who can guide you through the rest of the process.

Tags: claiming dependents, dependents, irs, tax filing

This entry was posted on Tuesday, June 30th, 2009 at 7:25 pm and is filed under FAQ.