My wife is a U.S. resident and I am still a nonresident in the UK. Can we really file one joint return if I was never a U.S. resident this year?
I am a UK founder with a Delaware LLC and around $96,000 of foreign consulting income. My wife lives and works in New York and files as a U.S. resident. I stayed nonresident for U.S. tax purposes all year and never assumed I could appear on a normal U.S. joint return.
Our preparer says we may be able to elect to treat me as a U.S. resident for the whole year so we can file jointly, but that also sounds like it might pull my UK income into the U.S. return. I want to understand whether that election is real and what the actual tradeoff is before we do anything irreversible.
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