My spouse is a nonresident alien who lived and worked outside the US for all of 2020. I lived in the US the whole time. Both federal and New York State are requiring me to report his SSN (he has none), and additionally NY State requires I report his income and deductions, even though I am filing separately and he is not filing in the US at all because he is not taxed here. What should I do? Will TurboTax will let me file with the fields blank? Will that cause problems with the authorities? Or will TurboTax simply block the returns from being filed if the fields are blank? (He could use an ITIN instead of SSN if he had one, but he doesn't and isn't required to because we've never filed jointly and he's never lived here.)
The IRS's instructions about the SSN field clearly state "If your spouse doesn’t have and isn’t required to have an SSN or ITIN, enter NRA in the space for your spouse's SSN” but TurboTax won't let you enter letters in the field (https://www.irs.gov/publications/p501)
As for NY State, the TurboTax pop-up instructions say "if you have a more complicated residency situation (for example, your spouse has a different residency than you) it may be ncessary to change your residency." But there's no place to do this. I've repeated the entire filing process 10 or 15 times and there's no place where you can specify the spouse has different residency - it's not mentioned anywhere other than in this one spot.
Many thanks for the help!
