@rapdevils
Absolutely, 100% untrue. The IRS does not follow a custody order. The IRS requires that you count the number of nights where the child lived with each parent. In any year that is not a leap year, it can’t be 50-50 because there is an odd number of nights.
The tax code is federal law which supersedes state law and state court orders. The IRS follows actual physical custody because it is not the IRS’s responsibility to judge how much support a parent paid, or whether a parent met the conditions of a custody order such as taking custody a certain number of days or making certain child support payments. None of that matters on your federal tax return, only which parent the child lived with more than half the year. In a leap year, and in the event the child lived with each parent exactly half the nights, the first IRS tiebreaker is which parent has a higher income, not what the state court custody order says.
All this is written down in IRS publication 501 and from that you can follow to the regulations and the tax code.
https://www.irs.gov/pub/irs-pdf/p501.pdf
