I'm not sure if this is the best place to ask this, so if anyone has some suggestions for somewhere more suitable, please let me know. ( US Tax Questions )
Technically, you shouldn't have been able to put the April date at the top without a complicated procedure to change your personal tax year. (I did actually go read the rules on this at one point, thinking it would be nice to have US and UK tax years match, and decided it was way too difficult to bother with.) The fact that the IRS didn't seem to catch it means you got away with it anyway.
I would guess that the easiest thing to do is report Jan - Dec for 2007 (since you probably didn't officially alter your tax year anyway), and Jan-March with your 2008 return. There will be some weird overlap for the beginning of 2007 if you do that, but if you're not running up against the exclusion limit, that shouldn't be a worry. If you file April-Dec or April-April, you risk having the IRS finally notice that you were playing around with your tax year.
Erk, well I didn't know that, thanks! The dates were open to be filled in at the top of the 1040 form so I figured it was fine. Luckily I guess our returns have slipped under the belt since they are very uninteresting what with all the zeros. This is what happens when the US Citizen in the family is too lazy to do any paperwork and so it gets left to the non-citizen to do it so it actually gets done! Thanks for your advice, will figure out the proper tax year amounts!
She's absolutely right - you shouldn't have been able to do it, but the person looking at it was probably seeing income under the exclusion amount and knowing that even if it was audited, the only thing that would happen is a switch of dates, not a difference in taxable income amount. The IRS isn't big on auditing overseas returns, but they're even less likely to touch them if there is no money at all in it for them!
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Technically, you shouldn't have been able to put the April date at the top without a complicated procedure to change your personal tax year. (I did actually go read the rules on this at one point, thinking it would be nice to have US and UK tax years match, and decided it was way too difficult to bother with.) The fact that the IRS didn't seem to catch it means you got away with it anyway.
I would guess that the easiest thing to do is report Jan - Dec for 2007 (since you probably didn't officially alter your tax year anyway), and Jan-March with your 2008 return. There will be some weird overlap for the beginning of 2007 if you do that, but if you're not running up against the exclusion limit, that shouldn't be a worry. If you file April-Dec or April-April, you risk having the IRS finally notice that you were playing around with your tax year.
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Thanks for your advice, will figure out the proper tax year amounts!
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I left all the tax stuff to my husband when we switched sides and then switched again,..
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