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Show Income Tax Fax By Peter James Wikel Public Accountant You can deduct up to $600 for the care of your children to enable en-able you to work, if you can qualify, and provided you use the long form 1040 and itemize your deductions. This can be deducted only if it is for the care of your son, step-son, daughter or step-daughter under 12 years of age; or for the care of any other dependent for whom you are entitled to an exemption who is mentally or physically incapable of caring for himself. The expense must be paid and it cannot be paid to an individual for whom you claim a dependency dependen-cy exemption. In other words, you cannot pay your mother who lives with you to care for your children chil-dren and also claim her as your dependent. You can only make this deduction deduc-tion provided the cost is for you to earn a living or to enable you to look for work. If you work only part of the day and pay for child care for all the day, then you can deduct only the part that corresponds to the time your were working, not for the time you were not working. Also, a married woman can deduct de-duct her child care expense only if she and her husband file a joint return and together earn less than $4,500 per year. If they earn over $4,500 per year, then the deduction is reduced by the amount earned over the $4,500. If they earn over $5,100, then there is no deduction. This does not apply if the taxpayer's husband hus-band is incapable of self-support because mentally or physically defective. If the person who receives the payment does work other than child care, the payment is allowed allow-ed only for that part that is child care and the payments that are attributable to other work are not allowable. The deduction is allowed only to women and to widowers. Widowers Wid-owers include men who are divorced di-vorced or legally separated and have not remarried. A separate statement should be attached to your tax return giving the details of the deduction that you are taking and a simple statements state-ments of the facts concerning the age or physical condition of the dependent, etc. |