My daughter received a 1099-MISC form instead of a W-2 from her employer, but she is not self-employed. I'm claiming her as a dependent. How do I file her 1099-MISC?

[KatherineC · Accepted solution]

While you see your daughter as employed, the Form 1099-MISC tells the IRS that your daughter was paid as an independent contractor.  Which means her income will be subject to Self-Employment taxes, unless the total reported is less than $432.00. 

She can always check with her employer about this, but if the employer was withholding payroll tax, it is highly unlikely that they would have mistakenly reported her “wages” on Form 1099-MISC instead of Form W-2.

You don’t report her income, even though you are reporting her as your dependent.

 Your daughter will need to file her own return.  Her income will have to be reported as Self-Employment income

[briggsr]

The question here begs the answer, did your daughter ever get a payroll check with taxes withheld or did she just get a check written out to her name?  If payroll taxes were withheld, she was hired as an employee. If they were not withheld, she was contracted with to receive a certain amount of money. The Federal Government and the State have a lot of publications regarding whether she is an employee or not. Some of the questions are: Does the person Employing or Contracting with the Daughter, give your daughter the tools to work with, training, tell her what time she has to work and how she has to do her job and exercise reasonable control over her work. Then, there may be an argument that she actually was an employee if the answer is yes to any of those questions.  My best thought though here, is did she fill out a W-9, which means she is contracting or did she fill out a W-4, which means she is an employee.

[natedogg1268]

I would fill out a form SS-8. It's tedious but may be worth it. From what I've read, many people get 1099-MISC's when they should be getting W-2's. It's an error on the employer's part.

[SweetieJean]

The original post is two years old.

[aleser17]

@natedogg1268 is it too late to submit an SS-8 for 2018 taxes? do you know how it works?