Marriage Annulled

My understanding, but I don't have an authoritative citation at my fingertips, is that you need to amend all open years to file as single. This is discussed in Pub. 504.

Ira Smilovitz, EA Leonia, NJ

Thanks Ira - that's exactly what I needed.

Revenue Ruling 76-255; 1976-2 C.B. 40. See Situation 1. Pub 504 matches the ruling.

Would the "husband" be single or married filing separately? I'd think the latter if he's married to someone else.

Yes, married filing separately seems to be the IRS position. Annulment means the marriage never existed. So the couple have to go back and file new returns to show the actual state of things (i.e. not married to each other) for the open years.

The IRS does recognize common-law marriages, which is kind of what this is. That is, this couple did live together as husband and wife and held themselves out to the community as married and in fact believed they were married. So by common-law definitions, I think they legally were married.

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Wow! There are so many problems with this.

First, yes, the IRS recognizes marriages that are valid under state law. And there are a few (very few) states that have "common law" marriages. So living together in those states may create a legal marriage, which would be recognized not only by the IRS but everywhere else.

But living together in other states does not create a "common law" marriage. Living together in almost all the states does not mean the couple are married.

But in this case the couple actually had a marriage ceremony. It was invalid because the "husband" was (unknowingly to the wife) still married to someone else. When the officiant asks if anyone knows of any reason the couple can't be married, that's the reason they say that - to determine whether one of the people is already married.

So even if the couple lived in a common law marriage state, they would not have been married because the husband was married to someone else. Even under common law marriage you can't be married to more than one person at a time. And there is no such thing as common law divorce - living apart does not terminate a marriage, even one created in a common law marriage state.

From Publication 504: "On the amended return, you will change your filing status to single or, if you meet certain requirements, head of household."

According to Stuart O. Bronstein snipped-for-privacy@lexregia.com:

Here's an unhelpful thought experiment.

Let's say the happy couple went on an early honeymoon to Dubai and got married there. The UAE follows Islamic law and allows a husband to have four wives so the marriage would be legal there. Then they come home.

Now what?

R's, John

I had an earlier response that got things all mixed up. Please ignore it. Here is another, hopefully less inept try:

It appears likely the bigamist husband would be "considered unmarried" when evaluating head of household filing requirements. If he meets the rest of HOH requirements, he may be able to file as HOH for one or more of the open years. If he doesn't qualify as HOH, the filing status looks like married filing separately (unless the previous spouse also agrees to married filing jointly amended returns).

That's a very interesting question. Because generally when someone visits from a country that allows multiple spouses, the US recognizes those marriages as valid while the people are in the US.

But I suspect that the result would be a bit different if people from the US, intending to return to the US, went somewhere just for the purpose of entering into multiple marriages. In that case they'd probably be considered valid in the country where the marriages took place, but not in the US.

While they're not the same, see the three US Supreme Court cases called Williams v. North Carolina. In that case a man and a woman, each married to other people and residing in North Carolina, both moved to Nevada. There they obtained divorces from their current spouses and then married each other.

They stayed in Nevada for a number of years, but eventually moved back to North Carolina, where they were arrested for bigamy. The Court said that North Carolina didn't need to honor the Nevada divorces because they did not provide for sufficient notice to the NC spouses.

So the convictions were upheld. On the bright side, the case(s) dragged on for so many years that by the time the final appeal ran out, the couple had died and never ended up having to spend time in jail.