hokietrax, I only see military pensions mentioned in your replies, so it's not clear that any of those asking here are asking in regard to military pensions.
Military pensions apparently can be problematic because they can be slow to implement payments to an alternate payee. One could perhaps nominee the income by issuing the ex-spouse a Form 1099-R for the ex-spouse's portion and filing this form and a corresponding Form 1096 with the IRS. However, I've never been able to find any IRS guidance on how to report the details of this involving a Form 1099-R. I suspect that one should show the entire original amount on 2020 Form 1040 line 5a and only the amount taxable to the original recipient on line 5b, then include an explanation statement describing being the nominee of the ex-spouse's portion and stating the gross and taxable amounts transferred to the ex-spouse. Other types of Form 1099 income are generally reported on some form of the tax return other than directly on Form 1040 where the nominee income can be listed as a subtraction, obviating the need for a separate explanation statement.
Still, if the divorce or separation instrument does not specify that the military pension is to be paid directly to the ex-spouse as an alternate payee, the nominee process would probably be inappropriate.
hokietrax, note that the reference you provided in mid 2020 was updated on January 7, 2021. I don't have any way to know what it said previously, so I don't know if anything relevant to the discussion here changed. It doesn't seem to have been updated for the current Form 1040 line numbers, though, still referring to Form 1040 line numbers for years prior to 2018.
