{"id":219,"date":"2014-12-08T00:00:00","date_gmt":"2014-12-08T00:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/getirshelp.com\/blog\/innocent-spouse-relief-whats-that\/"},"modified":"2026-07-27T14:53:41","modified_gmt":"2026-07-27T14:53:41","slug":"innocent-spouse-relief-whats-that","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/getirshelp.com\/blog\/innocent-spouse-relief-whats-that\/","title":{"rendered":"Innocent Spouse Relief &#8211; Whats That?"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Knowledge is protection when the IRS is involved. I&#039;m Darrin Mish, a tax attorney in Tampa with 32 years of experience representing taxpayers nationwide. Here&#039;s what I want you to understand.<\/p>\n<p><script type=\"text\/javascript\">\nvar playerhost = ((\"https:\" == document.location.protocol) ? \"https:\/\/ezs320edcd54d6abc8e8d4dad3f368a0c42c.s3.amazonaws.com\/ezs3js\/secure\/\" : \"http:\/\/ezs320edcd54d6abc8e8d4dad3f368a0c42c.s3.amazonaws.com\/ezs3js\/player\/\");\ndocument.write(unescape(\"%3Cscript src='\" + playerhost + \"flv\/26F7904B-FE48-A478-2F692FE64178A888.js' type='text\/javascript'%3E%3C\/script%3E\"));\n<\/script><\/p>\n<p><strong>Darrin Mish:<\/strong> Hi, today we are going to talk about innocent spouse. Innocent spouse  relief is what it&#8217;s technically called; there are three types of  different innocent spouse reliefs. The first, and they are going to be  handled in this order of analysis by the way, I believe innocent spouse  is a very tough hurdle. When Congress passed the law, they made a big  deal out of what help they were giving to innocent taxpayers.<\/p>\n<p>They  made a big deal out of it like it was going to help a lot of people. In  my opinion, it&#8217;s a very tough hurdle, it&#8217;s very fact specific and it&#8217;s  actually pretty hard to get. There are three types of innocent spouse.  The first type we call classic innocent spouse. It&#8217;s covered in  Internal Revenue Code 6015, subsection B.<\/p>\n<p>I&#8217;m  not a big code guy, and I&#8217;m not going to make a lot of code citations,  usually. It&#8217;s important in an innocent spouse arena, because it is so  factually based. The first is called classic innocent spouse, and we  will go over the elements in a later blog post of blog cast post.<\/p>\n<p>The  second is called the separate liability election. That&#8217;s basically,  where two spouses have filed a joint return and under certain  circumstances, that joint return can be split. Only the innocent  spouse&#8217;s tax liability will have to be paid if they in fact prevail in  an innocent spouse claim.<\/p>\n<p>The last type  of <a class=\"wpil_keyword_link\" href=\"https:\/\/getirshelp.com\/blog\/irs-innocent-spouse-relief\/\"   title=\"innocent spouse relief\" data-wpil-keyword-link=\"linked\"  data-wpil-monitor-id=\"917\">innocent spouse relief<\/a> is called equitable relief. It&#8217;s basically a  catch all. It goes for the type of situation where&#8230; it&#8217;s just not  fair to hold the so called innocent spouse liable for the misdeeds of  the so called guilty spouse, and essentially the IRS, if you can show  hardship; the IRS may in fact grant you equitable relief.<\/p>\n<p>The  cool thing about innocent spouse, though, is it&#8217;s basically of all  three prongs to go ahead and try to prevail. It&#8217;s like a stepladder,  you keep stepping up until you run out of options. As I said, innocent  spouse is complicated, it is difficult to obtain, but it has worked for  a lot of people in the United States, a lot of taxpayers.<\/p>\n<p>By  all means, we should always consider it as a possibility if you have a  married couple, one of whom, was responsible for the lion&#8217;s share of  the debts.<\/p>\n<p>OK, that&#8217;s it for now. We are going to be going over the technical details of all three types in the future. So I&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Knowledge is protection when the IRS is involved. I&#039;m Darrin Mish, a tax attorney in Tampa with 32 years of experience representing taxpayers nationwide. Here&#039;s what I want you to understand. Darrin Mish: Hi, today we are going to talk about innocent spouse. Innocent spouse relief is what it&#8217;s technically called; there are three types [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"rop_custom_images_group":[],"rop_custom_messages_group":[],"rop_publish_now":"initial","rop_publish_now_accounts":[],"rop_publish_now_history":[],"rop_publish_now_status":"pending","footnotes":""},"categories":[591],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-219","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-irs-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/getirshelp.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/219","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/getirshelp.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/getirshelp.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/getirshelp.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/getirshelp.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=219"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/getirshelp.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/219\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":22385,"href":"https:\/\/getirshelp.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/219\/revisions\/22385"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/getirshelp.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=219"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/getirshelp.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=219"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/getirshelp.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=219"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}