Got married in 2015 but filing separately

[Daniel]

Hello,

 

Me and my wife got married in September 2015, but decided to file taxes separately. However, the system doesn't allow me to continue unless I enter my wife's information in my return:

 

Your marital status indicates that you are married or have a common-law spouse, but you did not provide any spousal information. To add your spouse's information, click on add spouse in the family navigation bar.

 

 

Is this strictly necessary?

 

Thanks.

[overtaxed58]

First off, you always file your taxes separately, but being married involves the need to have some amounts copied from one return to the other due to the tax rules, so it is usually handy to prepare the returns together. You could still prepare them separately, but that would require more manual work in transferring the amounts and other information, as you have discovered.

[Bretonix]

The fact that is missed by many people is that in Canada there is no "joint filing" as there is in the States.

[incredimike]

There is a simple drop-down to select "Net Income Only" for the line "What information will you provide for your spouse?" instead of filling out complete details. More info here: http://community.ufile.ca/index.php?/topic/152-spouses-net-income/?p=427

[AltaRed]

Tax software does it this way so that it saves time doing both returns....and both can be saved as one file. I wouldn't do it any other way than to do 'family' returns. Why would you want to keep 2 completely different files?

 

There are benefits to keeping one file. The software optimizes benefits that could go to one spouse or the other. Example: Assigning all medical expenses to the lowest taxed spouse, assigning all donations to the higher taxed spouse, and for seniors, pension income splitting. That is what UFile's MaxBack analyzer is for. It iterates for the best combined solution.

 

For what reason would you want to keep 2 separate files?