Can you claim head of household with a newborn born in December?

Question

what are the rules of claiming head of household when you have a child born in December? prior to our child being born, my fiance only claimed himself on his taxes. with our daughter being born in December 2009, he was told he could claim her. but was it right to claim head of household as well? we are now being audited.

Answer 1

Since you are being audited, let's go through this in detail.



First your fiance has to have a qualifying child as his dependent. Your fiance cannot be the dependent of anyone else.



For a qualifying child, he needs to meet the relationship test (birth certificate will do), the age test (met as long as the birth certificate shows 2009) and residency test. If the 3 of you live together and the hospital paperwork shows his address on it, you should be fine.



Once he has a qualifying child, then your fiance had to qualify for HOH. To meet that test, he has to show that he paid more than half the cost of keeping up his home. He does that by producing rent and utility receipts and copies of his payments. The IRS will also consider whether his income was high enough to have paid these himself.



If, on the other hand, you were living with your parents all year (and he with his parents) and they claimed you as a depenent, the IRS is going to ask why a breast feeding baby wasn't living with you.

Answer 2

If the child is alive on 12/31, you can claim. Totally fine to have claimed her and claimed HoH. They are asking him to prove he paid over half the expenses of the household for the year.

Answer 3

When the baby was born is not the issue because a newborn can be counted for the full year of the year the infant is born in. If he is the father of the baby, then the baby does qualify him to claim head of household. But, if he didn't have the highest income in the household, that might be the issue.



For example, if you, him, and the baby live with his parents and his parents have a higher income than he did, then he could still claim the child on his taxes, but because his income wasn't the highest income at that address, then he can't prove being the main support of the household, therefore, he can't claim head of household. He would claim single and still claim the child. Or, if you had a higher income than he did, then you should have claimed the child and could have claimed head of household.



The audit could also be just purely random. The IRS will randomly audit a certain percentage of tax returns and his could have just been one of the random ones.

Answer 4

yes. if you all live together, and don't live with parents or someone.

Answer 5

Random repost, do not answer.