TurboTax requiring nonresident alien spouse's SSN, income & deductions -??

[pasadena]

My spouse is a nonresident alien who lived and worked outside the US for all of 2020. I lived in the US the whole time. Both federal and New York State are requiring me to report his SSN (he has none), and additionally NY State requires I report his income and deductions, even though I am filing separately and he is not filing in the US at all because he is not taxed here. What should I do? Will TurboTax will let me file with the fields blank? Will that cause problems with the authorities? Or will TurboTax simply block the returns from being filed if the fields are blank? (He could use an ITIN instead of SSN if he had one, but he doesn't and isn't required to because we've never filed jointly and he's never lived here.)

The IRS's instructions about the SSN field clearly state "If your spouse doesn’t have and isn’t required to have an SSN or ITIN, enter NRA  in the space for your spouse's SSN” but TurboTax won't let you enter letters in the field (https://www.irs.gov/publications/p501)

As for NY State, the TurboTax pop-up instructions say "if you have a more complicated residency situation (for example, your spouse has a different residency than you) it may be ncessary to change your residency." But there's no place to do this. I've repeated the entire filing process 10 or 15 times and there's no place where you can specify the spouse has different residency - it's not mentioned anywhere other than in this one spot. 

Many thanks for the help!

[ErnieS0]

You will not be able to e-file without a Social Security or Individual Taxpayer Identification Number (ITIN) so leave the number blank or put in a dummy number, e.g. 111-11-1111. After you print your return, write "NRA" and mail your return. 

We suggest certified mail with return receipt so you have proof of delivery.

Your spouse is not filing a U.S. income tax return so his income, for U.S. tax purposes, is $0 (disregarded). Enter $0 on those lines.

[pasadena]

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@ErnieS0 wrote:

You will not be able to e-file without a Social Security or Individual Taxpayer Identification Number (ITIN) so leave the number blank or put in a dummy number, e.g. [social security number removed]. After you print your return, write "NRA" and mail your return. 

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OK, thanks for the quick reply. In looking around the NY State site and their forms I see they have strongly worded prohibitions against writing on the printed form in any way apart from the signature, if you download it from their site and type your answers into the pdf (i.e. not using TurboTax). That gave me pause about writing on my TurboTax printout. But I will assume that if it wasn't allowed, TurboTax would make that clear, and I'm not seeing any such proscriptions.

[ErnieS0]

If you are mailing it in, you can swap out the IT-201 or IT-203 with the New York state fill-in form and copy the numbers from the TurboTax forms.

If you are using TurboTax CD\Download you can use the Forms Mode and type in "NRA" for NY in the New York State Information Worksheet. which will transfer to the form. It will not work with federal.