Hah, I can't e-file my taxes at all, because it is not possible to e-file as "married, filing separately" if one has a non-resident alien spouse (without SSN or ITIN). Aka married overseas, US hadn't yet granted a visa yet, no point in trying to obtain an ITIN (that's harder than having to mail the form).
The form is totally fine - according to IRS, one just needs to write "NRA" ("non-resident alien") instead of spouse's SSN and that's it. But for some technical reason (despite, AFAIK, IRS having at least 4 iterations of XML schemas) e-filing is said to be not possible - one gotta print and mail it.
Worse, I had to explain how this works to "specialists" at H&R Block, as they almost made a mistake of suggesting to file my returns as "single" (glad I did my own research, huh). And I can't use FreeTaxUSA because they don't support such scenario either.
Edit: Upd: freefilefillableforms.com doesn't let me type in "NRA" in that field either. (Doesn't really matter, works for me as long as I get a PDF out of this)
As a taxpayer and software engineer, I think it’s a good thing that the irs built or bought an e-filing system that doesn’t handle every scenario. Because I know if they spec’ed out such a system it would have cost a lot more money, have taken longer to build, and been buggier.
We should all be on the lookout for cases when a system can be developed to handle >99% of cases and kick the hard remaining ones out to a manual process.
You are correct, of course. I was writing my comment with two ideas: a) venting some steam as I'm of course upset that I can't e-file; b) telling that things some take for granted, such as an ability to file electronically, aren't really universal.
I suppose the issue is that they had to start from scratch. It's not really about software, it's only a data structure here that's problematic - an XML schema that doesn't allow to make some value kind of optional.
IRS most certainly has an existing data structure that can handle all scenarios. They don't just file outlier cases as a paper in some cabinet - they do digitize those mail-in forms and input them into a computer. I had downloaded back a transcript and it's all in there, my 1040 was digitized, so I know it for a fact.
It's just probably that it's hidden in an ugly giant legacy system (possibly involving some Fortran-running mainframe somewhere) so they weren't able to realistically extract this full schema from there. Or deemed it too flawed.
A shame that they probably will never be able to afford a proper rewrite (sometimes legacy code gets too convoluted it becomes impossible to treat it as anything but a black box).
Yes. Just click submit at the end, and in somewhere between 15 minutes and a couple of hours you'll get a response from the IRS whether it was accepted or rejected with an error message of what didn't match up.
(Sometimes it takes me 2 or 3 tries because I mistyped a number from a W2 or missed a line or something.)
