Anthony Infanti (Pittsburgh), Inequitable Administration: Documenting Family for Tax Purposes 22 Colum. J. Gender & L. 329 (2011):

Family can bring us joy, and it can bring us grief. It can also bring us tax benefits and tax detriments. Often, as a means of ensuring compliance with Internal Revenue Code provisions that turn on a family relationship, taxpayers are required to document their relationship with a family member. Most visibly, taxpayers are denied an additional personal exemption for a child or other dependent unless they provide on their tax return the individual’s name, Social Security number, and relationship to the taxpayer.

In this article, I examine these documentation requirements. At first blush, it appears that Congress and the Internal Revenue Service have only randomly and haphazardly imposed requirements on taxpayers to document family relationships. But, upon delving more deeply into these requirements, it becomes clear that a pattern emerges from the chaos. The government’s randomness is not really all that random, having been strongly influenced by endemic privilegings along a variety of axes of subordination – from class to race to gender to sexual orientation. This article advocates a more deliberative approach to documenting family for tax purposes – and one that does not invidiously discriminate among taxpayers.