Personal exemption for deceased spouse

You are correct. A MFJ return allows both a personal and spousal exemption, regardless of whether the spouse is alive at the end of the year.

No. No one takes an exemption for a person in any year after their year of death. QW filing status is only a two year transition from MFJ to Head of Household (HH). If there are no qualifying persons for HH, there is no QW status (and the rules for qualifying person for QW are slightly different than the rules for HH).

-Mark Bole

The surviving spouse is filing a joint return with the deceased spouse, thus two personal exemptions are claimed; one for the surviving spouse and a second for the late spouse.

No. A QW claims only his or her one personal exemption. However a QW gets the benefits of the married filing joint tax rates for two years following the year of his or her spouse's death.

Publication 559 is a good reference for information about decedents' returns.

Condor

========================================= MODERATOR'S COMMENT: And notice that Form 1040 nows labels this filing status as: Qualifying widow(er) with dependent child

Yes, it is the same as if the spouse is still living. However, it's not because the taxpayer is taking the spouse's exemption. The spouse is claiming his/her own exemption.

No. There is no exemption to claim.

That is strictly a nomenclature issue, most laypeople don't consider the dead spouse to be doing much of anything. I catch myself sometimes when I start to say to a client "you have to file an individual return for the year you die", because of course they don't, even if someone else does.

While the distinction between personal exemption and spousal exemption is completely arbitrary and up to the taxpayers involved, I have been told by someone much more experienced than I, that it is a good idea, for the final MFJ return in this situation, to put the surviving spouse's name and SSN first on the return if previously in the second spot.

-Mark Bole

chEAr$, Harlan

If I had to make a complete guess, I'd say because the software will pro forma much easier to next year. Maybe.

I've always done that. It lessens the chance that the next year's ES payments and return will be filed under the decedent's SSN. People have been known to just use a voucher or slap on a label without looking at it. Of course, this is somewhat a holdover from the days when the SSN's were on the label. They don't call it Newton's first law for nothing.

This type of return will (should?) process just fine with the deceased spouse's name listed first, however, I always recommend the return list the surviving spouse's name first. The reason I recommend filing this way is that in the case of elderly couples who have been married many years and have typically been filing with the husband's name listed first, if an entity was ever established on the IRS masterfile for the secondary spouse (usually the wife), that entity would have dropped off the system many years ago. Since the secondary spouse will be filing her future returns as a single taxpayer, and sometimes even making estimated tax payments, listing her name first on the final MFJ return will obviate future processing problems that sometimes occur when her entity has dropped off the system or even if still present contains an old address.

Condor

Harlan Lunsford wrote: [...]

Fortunately others answered with all of the reasons I would have stated.

Even without a deceased spouse situation, the secondary SSN can be problematic. I saw a routine letter once from California state tax authority to a wife who started working after many years out of the work force, and also apparently off the income tax radar. They wanted to know where her tax returns were for prior years! One of the check boxes on the response form was "I filed jointly with my spouse in prior years".

-Mark Bole

A personal exemption exists if the person was alive at any time during the year.

Seth