Hi,
So my wife is from Vietnam. However, she attended University in the US from 2013-2017. During 2013-2017, she had on-campus job at her University. She also has a US social security card. When I questioned her about her taxes for those years, she said someone from the University filed her taxes for her and that she does not have any copies of those tax returns. My wife is clueless when it comes to US taxes, so I am not even sure if she even knows 100% that the person she is referring to actually filed her taxes.
At the end of 2017, my wife went back to Vietnam, but came back one year later to attend Grad School in the US. My wife did not work in 2018, but started working on-campus in 2019.
Fast forward to today, we got married in 2019, but I have no idea how I should approach filing our taxes for the 2019 tax year. I am completely knowledgeable about filing taxes for my own tax situation, but since we plan to file MFJ for 2019, I am not sure about the following items:
- When filing for 2019, how important is it that I obtain her last tax return from years ago since she has probably not filed since 2017? If it is important, please explain why and how do I go about obtaining her last tax return? I tried using the IRS tool "Get Transcript", to pull her previous tax information, but had no luck.
- Her US social security card looks different than mine, it has "Use for Work Authorization Only" written on it. Does that matter at all? Can I use this social security # when filing our taxes?
- Based on what I've described, will I be able to efile our tax returns for 2019 or does anything about our tax situation cause us to be unable to efile our taxes? If I can't efile, can I still do it through TurboTax and mail in the return?
- If there are any questions that you think I should have asked in order for me to file our taxes for 2019, please let me know. Any information helps.
