Question

Filing tax return for my 4 year old daughter - prevent identity theft

Forum|Forum|3 years ago
March 7, 2023
1 reply
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Hi,

My 4 year old daughter doesn’t have any earned or unearned income. I heard about identity theft is very serious and filing tax return (such as putting $1 hobby income in the return) for her is the only way to protect her identity. I tried using the Turbo Tax free online version and created account for my daughter. But it didn’t allow me to proceed since she is under 13.

If I bought the deluxe, is it going to allow me to file tax return for my daughter? Please advise. Thanks!

O

Opus 17

Employee

What you really want to do is to opt-in to the identity protection PIN program. The IRS mails you a new IP-PIN to your address of record every tax season and you can't file without it. However, be aware that once you opt-in, you must always use the IP-PIN to file, even if it is inconvenient.

While filing a return with $1 of income creates a record in the system, I have never seen a recommendation to do so, and I don't think it would actually be very secure. If a crook wants to e-file a fake return for your child, they could always guess $1 for their prior year AGI to allow them to e-file a current year return.

A

AskTaxQAuthor

Hi,

Thank you for you response and suggestion! It is a good idea to consider the IP PIN option. I guess the benefit of doing the $1 filing is to tell whether the child has encountered identity theft (if e-file got rejected).

If I bought the turbo tax deluxe, does it going to allow me to file tax return for my child who is under 5 years old? Since product is not returnable on Amazon, I would like to make sure it will work for my case. I have tried the turbo tax free online version, the system does not collect information for taxpayer who is under 13 years old.

Please advise. Thank you!