Many employers provide domestic partner benefits to their employees, especially in the form of health care plans. Domestic partners are not considered spouses under the Internal Revenue Code. Nor, of course, are same-sex spouses so long as DOMA is in effect. Many employers assume that this means all domestic partner (or same-sex spouse) benefits are taxable under the federal tax law. But this is not true. A partner (or same-sex spouse) can qualify as a dependent and benefits paid to dependents are also tax-exempt. A person can qualify as a dependent for purposes of excluding the value of health care plans from income even if the person cannot be claimed as a dependent on the employee taxpayer's return. This essay describes the applicable rules in some detail. It also provides a survey of colleges and universities that provide such benefits and analyzes how many of such employers are applying the wrong tax law to their employees.
On February 24, 2006, the IRS issued guidance with respect to the federal income tax treatment of domestic partners in California. The ruling closed the door on those California domestic partners who were considering splitting in half the combined domestic partnership income from property and services for purposes of filing federal income taxes. This article demonstrates that the Service got it wrong in its unpersuasive, historically inaccurate, and ultimately indefensible memorandum.The California Domestic Partner Rights and Responsibilities Act grants registered domestic partners the same rights, protections, and benefits as married couples under California's community property regime. There is a presumption - as there is for opposite-sex married couples during marriage - that all income and property acquired during the domestic partnership is community property, with each partner enjoying equal ownership interests. Notwithstanding these equivalent ownership interests - the same interests which have allowed spouses in California to divide income in half when filing federal income taxes for a period that predates by nearly twenty years the enactment of the income-splitting joint return in 1948 - the IRS found that registered domestic partners cannot split income. The Service's analysis relied heavily on Poe v. Seaborn, the 1930 U.S. Supreme Court case granting income-splitting privileges to married couples in the community property state of Washington. According to the IRS, the Supreme Court's decision in Seaborn does not apply to the application of community property law outside the context of a husband and wife. If the legal analysis in Seaborn had anything to do with marriage, the Service's reasoning might be appropriate. But it didn't. Poe v. Seaborn was about ownership of the community's income from property and services, not about marriage. In fact, during the 1920s and 1930s, marriage per se did not inform the Supreme Court's jurisprudence involving the taxation of husbands and wives residing in community property versus common law states. The Court was much more concerned with, alternatively, management and control (or dominion) over community/marital income and property on the one hand, and ownership (or legal title and vested or expectancy interests) on the other.
Under DOMA, tax exemptions for employer-provided health benefits are available unequally to same-sex and opposite-sex spouses. The Tax Equity for Health Plan Beneficiaries Act would make the law more equitable, but it should also extend the tax exclusion for dismemberment benefits to same-sex partners.
Employer's Tax Guide (Circular E) - The Families First Coronavirus Response Act (FFCRA), enacted on March 18, 2020, and amended by the COVID-related Tax Relief Act of 2020, provides certain employers with tax credits that reimburse them for the cost of providing paid sick and family leave wages to their employees for leave related to COVID‐19. Qualified sick and family leave wages and the related credits for qualified sick and family leave wages are only reported on employment tax returns with respect to wages paid for leave taken in quarters beginning after March 31, 2020, and before April 1, 2021, unless extended by future legislation. If you paid qualified sick and family leave wages in 2021 for 2020 leave, you will claim the credit on your 2021 employment tax return. Under the FFCRA, certain employers with fewer than 500 employees provide paid sick and fam-ily leave to employees unable to work or telework. The FFCRA required such employers to provide leave to such employees after March 31, 2020, and before January 1, 2021. Publication 15 (For use in 2021)
