Hi,

I came to US for first time on March 2013 with my wife. She left US for good on Mid August 2013. My wife is housewife.

I came to know that I have to go for option Married Filling Jointly. I have my W2 with me.

Can you please respond to below questions?

1. Do I have to apply for ITIN for my wife?
2. Do I need to bring any document from India?
3. What is the last date for Tax Filing?

Thanks
Suman

It is probably most advantageous for you to file jointly with your wife, filing Form 1040 with Form 1116 to claim the Foreign Tax Credit. Form 1116 is required because you must claim ALL world-wide income earned in 2012, and the Form 1116 allows you to claim a credit for the income taxes paid to your home country.

You will need to apply for an Individual Tax Identification Number (ITIN) for your wife by submitting Form W-7, and that process underwent some radical procedural changes in 2013. Instead of the simple notarization process, the IRS now requires that your home country certify the photocopy of your passport as a true copy. This is due to rampant fraud in the ITIN submission process. The notaries simply cannot tell the difference between a fake passport and the genuine passport.

FIRST ALTERNATIVE: For Indian clients, this certification can be done by the Indian embassy in Washington, D.C. or at one of the consulates in San Francisco, Chicago, Houston or New York. Assuming you do NOT want to drive there, you need to call the nearest consulate and arrange to have this process done via the mail. Since you usually must wait until June to file, you have time to get this done (the process, done via mail, can take up to three months to complete). My clients to date have had the best results by mail with the San Francisco consulate, getting the certified passport photocopies in less than 3 weeks.

SECOND ALTERNATIVE: Your wife can get the certification done in India by the Indian government agency who issued the passport.

OR

The U.S. embassy or a U.S. consulate in India will also certify a passport as authentic. I recommend she call and make an appointment for this, and it is likely a fee will be required.

THIRD ALTERNATIVE. I am a Certifying Acceptance Agent, and I can certify the passport.

You would mail the passport and the SIGNED Form W-7 and SIGNED tax return to me. I would contact you via SKYPE, conduct a brief interview with your spouse, certify the passport, attach the certification to the SIGNED W-7 and sign both documents. I would also sign the tax return, then paperclip the W-7 with certification to the tax return, and then mail them to the IRS ITIN Processing Center in Austin, Texas.

The passport I would mail BACK to you via tracked PRIORITY MAIL, so the passport would be out of your possession for about a week.

The FINAL alternative is to mail in the actual passports themselves, something most of my clients are reluctant to do because...

If the IRS gets the passport, they hold it for about TWO months.

If you need my professional help, please email me at the email address in my profile.

Hi,
Thanks for you reply.

If I understood the third option correctly, I have to do following things.

Bring My Wife's Passport from India
Send That to You.
Have a Skype seesion with you, me and my wife.

Can you please validate this?

Thanks
Suman

Suman,

Yes, that is EXACTLY how it works. However, unlike the IRS, I hold the passport only as long as I need it to conduct the SKYPE interview. Once I am done, I send it back to you via PRIORITY MAIL, so it is out of your possession for, at most, a week.

The IRS keeps it for at least TWO months.