Marrying and moving out of state

[pascott95]

I was single in 2019 and lived in Colorado. I got married in February 2020 to an Arizona resident and moved to Arizona on March 4, 2020. I want to file my federal taxes for 2020 jointly, and TurboTax is telling me that I have to file my AZ taxes separately. However, it has reviewed my AZ tax form done jointly and found no errors. I got some instructions in TurboTax that I have to redo my federal taxes separately after I have already filed them jointly (saving lots of money). I tried to do a revised Federal 1040 and it looks like it is just preparing a single 1040 and it is asking me all kinds of questions about community property that I don't understand. Help!

[DanielV01]

File a Married Filing Joint, part-year resident return for Arizona.  From the Arizona DOR website AZ Tax Filing Statuses (click link), comes the following information (alternate font used for quotes, italics added where indicated):  

Determining Your Filing Status

The filing status that you use on your Arizona return may be different from that used on your federal return.

If you qualify as married for federal purposes, you qualify as married for Arizona purposes and must file using the status of either married filing joint or married filing separate.

If you are single, you must file as single or if qualified you may file as head of household.

Married Filing Joint Return

You may file a joint return if you were married as of December 31, in the tax year. It does not matter whether or not you were living with your spouse. You may file a joint return, even if you and your spouse filed separate federal returns.

You may file a joint return if your spouse died during the tax year and you did not remarry in the tax year.

Arizona Form 140 is for full year residents only. You may not file a joint income tax return on Form 140 if any of the following apply (Italics added):

• Your spouse is a nonresident alien (citizen of and living in another country).
• Your spouse is a resident of another state.
• Your spouse is a part-year Arizona resident.  (Italics added)

If filing a joint return with your nonresident spouse, you must file a joint return using Arizona Form 140NR.

If filing a joint return with your part-year resident spouse, you must file a joint return using Arizona Form 140PY.  (Italics added)

Make sure that in the Personal Information section you have set this up correctly by indicating your personal residency in Arizona.  Your spouse will be a full-year resident, but you will state that you did live in another state in 2020 (Colorado), and indicate your Arizona move-in date.  Then make sure that the Arizona Part-year return is selected.  The Colorado income will be subtracted out of the return.

[pascott95]

This is the guy who asked the question.  Following the instructions given by the first reply did not give a different result.  The tax advice may be correct, but Turbotax does not handle it correctly. I am trying to file Federal taxes and Arizona taxes jointly with my wife even though I moved to Arizona and got married early in 2020. I and my wife are entered as Arizona residents in the personal info section and the correct date for me moving to Arizona is included.  When I open the Arizona return, it states that I must file separately  from my wife in Arizona and in order to do that I have to prepare a fake federal form filing separately.  How do I contact someone at Turbotax to get this resolved?

[ThomasM125]

@pascott95 You can use this link to learn how to contact an agent at TurboTax:

How to contact TurboTax