I and my wife worked and lived in different states for last year. I worked and lived in DE while she is in CA. We just tried to use Turbotax to do federal MFJ but then it will treat us MFJ with either DE or CA state taxes and we owe each state huge amount of money. Then we have to do MFS for federal in order to generate a correct state return in Turbotax, but it turns out we have to pay more for federal tax compared with MFJ.
So I am wondering how to handle state returns under this situation? I did read some post mentioned using a mock method to handle state taxes separately. But per CA tax law, you need to use the same filing status as you file your federal. I don't know if this Mock method is legal for file CA state taxes.
