Legal Question in Family Law in Maryland

Re: Spousal right to married filing separatleyy income ta returns

If you wanted to make a claim to the other spouse's income tax return, it would have been best to file jointly. If the marriage is deteriorating but the spouses are still together, then barring some agreement one could argue that since the income upon which the return is based was income earned during marriage, it is likely marital property.

Re: Spousal right to married filing separatleyy income ta returns

To pose your question in a legally analytic way, one might ask whether the respective tax refunds for each of the spouses who have elected to file under the "married filed separately" category constitute marital property subject to the reciprocal claims of each or do these single and separate refunds amount to no more than the sole personal property of the respective spouses

who have claimed them as refunds?

This is not necessarily an easy question to answer, but(nevertheless here goes), if neither of these spouses can credibly demonstrate that either he or she contributed in any substantial way to the labor (and/or funding, perhaps, of such labor which allowed it to occur, e.g. grubsteak, etc.) of the other which resulted in the reported income which caused the refund to be generated, the answer is, most probably, no i.e, the refunds represent the sole property of the individual claimants and are not marital property.