Burton Koss brought this up in another thread, but it is only very scantily related to that thread so I'll start another one.
It seems like this "multiple support agreement" is more of a factor of street myth than we realize. Like Burton, I've never seen such a thing in my 25+ years of practice, but I've heard plenty.
Some guy down at the University of South Florida had a syndicated column for tax advice, and he was widely read by faculty members at the University of Alabama/Huntsville. One day his headline read "How to Claim your Mother while not paying for her" and his discourse continued with the abovementioned "multiple support agreement."
I had (and still do) several faculty members. One day I was barraged with questions from an apparent lunch that these guys shared. Dr. Ghandi Singh Songh wanted to claim his mother in India (not even a citizen). Dr. Kronos Metsomos had a mother who was a citizen but living a wealthy lifestyle off her husband's fortune in Greece. Dr. Redneck Sullivant's (Mississippi) mother was on her own social security and he wasn't really contributing one red cent.
My first response was to call the guy down in South Florida and told him he was making my life miserable by stretching a little-known and hardly usable section and trying to make it a household word. He didn't respond, other than to say that the strategy was in fact legal.
He was, of course, correct. There actually is a FORM for this multiple support agreement, Form 2120 where a dependent jointly supported by family members can rotate the dependant in alternating years. Like Burton, I've never had occasion to use it but it has been around forever.
It seems like this "multiple support agreement" is more of a factor of street myth than we realize. Like Burton, I've never seen such a thing in my 25+ years of practice, but I've heard plenty.
Some guy down at the University of South Florida had a syndicated column for tax advice, and he was widely read by faculty members at the University of Alabama/Huntsville. One day his headline read "How to Claim your Mother while not paying for her" and his discourse continued with the abovementioned "multiple support agreement."
I had (and still do) several faculty members. One day I was barraged with questions from an apparent lunch that these guys shared. Dr. Ghandi Singh Songh wanted to claim his mother in India (not even a citizen). Dr. Kronos Metsomos had a mother who was a citizen but living a wealthy lifestyle off her husband's fortune in Greece. Dr. Redneck Sullivant's (Mississippi) mother was on her own social security and he wasn't really contributing one red cent.
My first response was to call the guy down in South Florida and told him he was making my life miserable by stretching a little-known and hardly usable section and trying to make it a household word. He didn't respond, other than to say that the strategy was in fact legal.
He was, of course, correct. There actually is a FORM for this multiple support agreement, Form 2120 where a dependent jointly supported by family members can rotate the dependant in alternating years. Like Burton, I've never had occasion to use it but it has been around forever.
Comment