This week, Noah H. Marks (UNC) reviews a new article by Nicholas L. Georgakopoulos (Indiana), Margaret Tarkington (Indiana), and Bridget Crawford (Pace), Spousal Economic Abuse: Tax Complicity and Solutions (Feb. 11, 2026).

The fact that the income tax system allows—and, indeed, encourages—married couples to file a joint tax return reporting pooled income is too often accepted, presumed, or mentioned in passing as a curiosity of tax administration. To the extent it is discussed, it is typical to flag that joint filing embeds particular underlying assumptions about relative earnings between spouses (i.e., the “marriage penalty”) and reflects normative assumptions about the prevalence of married spouses in the first place.

Nicholas Georgakopoulos, Margaret Tarkington, and Bridget Crawford’s recent piece, Spousal Economic Abuse: Tax Complicity and Solutions, takes a fresh, thorough, and critical look at the married-filing-jointly mechanism. Specifically, their article explicates the underlying assumptions embodied by joint filing and lays out, starkly, how it can function as a mechanism of control that exacerbates spousal economic abuse. To mitigate this, they propose broadening the scope of the innocent spouse doctrine under Section 6015.

The article’s jumping off point is the joint return mechanic. A joint return is a single tax return, comprehensively reporting the aggregate income of two married individuals. In other words, the married couple becomes a single taxable unit. Treasury Regulations, furthermore, require both individuals to sign the return, attesting to its accuracy under penalty of perjury. The article makes explicit what this necessitates: complete transparency between spouses about each spouse’s economic resources and income. And, indeed, the force of law backstops this, because each spouse is jointly and severally liable for tax on their aggregate income and correspondingly liable for penalties and interest arising from the return’s inaccuracies. Normatively, conditional on having joint returns in the first place, the article acknowledges that this is defensible; the tax system should not incentivize manipulation, intra-marriage secrets, or other strategic, tax evasion-like behavior.

But even if joint filing’s underlying assumptions about marriage—a happy union and partnership—hold true at first, they may quickly unravel. The article focuses on one form of unraveling, “spousal economic abuse.” Economic abuse is distinct from financial abuse, though both implicate money. The former focuses on economic performance; the latter, restricted expenditures. There are several different forms of economic abuse, which can overlap and intertwine. For example, a spouse can unreasonably restrict the other spouse’s ability to obtain an education or to accept employment, curtailing earning potential. Alternatively, a spendthrift spouse could control the family’s expenditures, spending beyond their means (including consuming the abused spouse’s earnings) on their own consumption and ignoring the other spouse’s preferences or desires to expand savings and investments. While such conduct prevents the abused spouse from leveraging the economic power of their resources in a variety of ways, one particularly insidious common consequence is preventing the couple from maintaining necessary reserves to pay their taxes. And once there’s a joint return, the abused spouse is jointly and severally liable for that deficiency, and any associated penalties and interest.

The article then turns to a spouse’s economically rational responses to economic abuse: secret employment, secret earnings, and secret savings. But at every turn, joint returns preclude such secrecy. They do so directly, because the return must reflect those activities, and indirectly, because they impose penalties for omitting such activities from the return. Interestingly, the article does not engage with the married-filing-separately option, which would in isolation allow such secrecy. But, interpolating from the article’s arguments, path dependence likely makes that impractical. Assuming happy marital beginnings, married-filing-separately would require changing filing status away from joint returns, necessitating the other spouse’s knowledge and inviting them to extend their economic abuse into precluding such change. Furthermore, as the IRS website advises, “most couples save money by filing jointly,” so there’s likely an economic cost to such a change.

Section 6015 acknowledges that joint and several liability can be unfair to a given spouse. But its core “innocent spouse” relief in Section 6015(b) (applicable to cohabitating, married spouses) is framed around a spouse who neither knew nor had reason to know that there was an understatement on a joint return. Neither would be true, the article highlights, of a spouse omitting employment, earnings, or savings from a joint return to protect themselves from a spendthrift or otherwise economically abusive spouse.

Helpfully, however, Section 6015(f) authorizes the government to relieve liability where, taking into account all facts and circumstances, imposing liability would be inequitable. And in Revenue Procedure 2013-34, the IRS has already identified financial control and abuse as relevant considerations for the exercise of that discretion. While that arguably can straightforwardly apply where a spendthrift spouse precludes the other spouse from saving resources to cover taxes (or preventing their expenditures), the article appropriately acknowledges that it is more difficult to extend to underreporting to conceal secret employment, earnings, and savings. Therefore, the authors propose that the IRS promulgate regulations allowing temporary, confidential separate (and presumably partial) filing for spouses who can provide corroborating evidence of economic abuse.

Normatively, the article convincingly demonstrates that one spouse’s systematic economic appropriation collapses the underlying premises and theory of joint filing. More open to debate, however, is whether, as the article describes, the partial separate return proposal would be an administrable, limited recalibration. To take one example of underlying complexity, presumably any additional income on the separate return would be marginal dollars on top of the joint return’s income, so the separate return would require the joint return to be finalized first to determine additional tax liability. Another similar complexity is how income reported on the separate return income would interact with income-based limits on benefits: what if, based on the joint return alone, the couple qualifies for the EITC but with the separate income added in, they no longer do? Likewise, the separate return should presumably be cabined to only reflect the activities, income, and savings necessary to be hidden to prevent, mitigate, or counteract abuse, but that would be difficult to police and would vary over time depending on the form of abuse (i.e., spendthrift precluding paying taxes versus prohibiting employment). And finally, regarding administrability, innocent spouse relief determinations are indeed already fact intensive. But those determinations arise only in the comparatively narrow context of ex post enforcement; this proposal, by contrast, would extend them to the compliance side, potentially encompassing significantly more spousal returns ex ante, on an annual basis.

Leaving aside particular solutions, the article effectively and persuasively shows that spousal economic abuse is one particularly troubling instance of tax administration’s (arguably willful) blindness to the complexities of and challenges in human relationships. And even worse, this gap results in tax law exacerbating abuse and inhibiting remedies. Hopefully, the article and its interesting proposal will inspire important conversations and remedial action.

Here is the rest of this week’s SSRN Tax Roundup:

Stanislav Ageev (MGIMO), Taxation of Banking Products: Risks or Opportunities for the Development of Digital Payment Infrastructure? (Feb. 26, 2026)

Frank Agostino (Agostino & Associates; Kostelanetz), Form 872-P and the Outer Limits of TEFRA Consents: Why Boilerplate Does Not Extend the Statute for Penalties, Additions to Tax, and Interest (Mar. 9, 2026)

Frank Agostino (Agostino & Associates; Kostelanetz), Work Authorization, Social Security Number Validity, and Refundable Credits (Mar. 5, 2026)

Frank Agostino (Agostino & Associates; Kostelanetz), Minimizing Pandemic-Era Tax Interest and Penalties: A Comprehensive How-To Guide (Feb. 20, 2026)

Reuven S. Avi-Yonah (Michigan), Corporate Taxation and Data Centers, U. Mich. Law & Econ. Rsch. Paper (Apr. 4, 2026)

Grant Christensen (Alabama) & Andrew D. Appleby (Tennessee), Taxing Indigenous Cultural Property, 52 BYU L. Rev. (forthcoming 2026)

Chidozie Chukwudumogu (Sydney), The Awkward Implications of an Undertaxed Profits Rule (Mar. 20, 2026)

Jing Cui (Arkansas), Tyler J. Kleppe (Kentucky, Von Allmen School of Accountancy), and Trent Krupa (Penn State, Smeal College of Business), Private Equity Ownership in Public Accounting: Enhanced Expertise or a Threat to Auditor Independence? (Apr. 3, 2026)

Michael P. Donohoe (Illinois, Accountancy), Hansol Jang (National University of Singapore Business School) & Pedro Lisowsky (Boston University, Questrom School of Business; Norwegian Center for Taxation), Corporate Payouts and the Banking Channel (Mar. 19, 2026)

Mirit Eyal (Alabama) & Jay A. Soled (Rutgers), Eliminate the Gambling Loss Tax Deduction (Mar. 23, 2026)

Helen Flannery (Vermont, Institute for Policy Studies) & Brian Mittendorf (Ohio State, Fisher College of Business), Campaigns and Capital Gains: The Relationship Between Nonprofit Political Spending, Investment Income, and Taxation (Mar. 20, 2026)

Luís Calderón Gómez (Cardozo), Charity’s Limits, 80 Tax L. Rev. (forthcoming 2026)

Bhanu Gupta (Ashoka), Tejawsi Velayudhan (Michigan), Vedant Vohra (San Diego) & Ankur Garg, Enhancing Revenue Collection Capacity through Automation: Evidence from a VAT (Mar. 16, 2026)

Tarun Jain (Supreme Court of India; London School of Economics; National Law University, Jodhpur), Power to Grant Interim Relief: Enlivening GST Appellate Tribunal (Mar. 18, 2026)

Junyoung Jeong (Stanford, Business), Rebecca Lester (Stanford, Business) & Kevin Smith (Stanford, Business), The Corporate Alternative Minimum Tax and Financial Reporting Incentives (Apr. 1, 2026)

Joseph Liberman (AQR Capital Management), Nathan Sosner (AQR Capital Management) & Pedro Freitas (AQR Capital Management), The Tax Benefits of Pre-Tax Alpha (Mar. 17, 2026)

Lloyd Hitoshi Mayer (Notre Dame), The Future of Nonprofit Regulation in the United States: Three Dynamic Trends (Apr. 1, 2026)

Sahar Mohamed, Determinants of Digital Responsibility Disclosure and Its Impact on the Financial Performance of Companies—Applied Study on Egyptian Name (Jan. 1, 2026)

Doron Narotzki (Akron, Daverio School of Accountancy), Tariffs in a Multi-Player Economy (Mar. 28, 2026)

Deanna Newton (Pepperdine), Tenure Mismatch Theory: Rethinking Federal Housing Subsidies Through Property Law, 80 Tax L. Rev. (forthcoming 2026)

Ashiqullah Pardisi, Taxation, Ethics & Public Policy: An Annotated Bibliography 1998–2025 (Mar. 19, 2026)

Ashiqullah Pardisi, Accounting, Ethics & Public Policy: An Annotated Bibliography 1998–2025 (Mar. 19, 2026)

Shailendra Uprety (S. Uprety & Associates), Taxation of Material Losses: Thousand Possibilities and One Truth (Apr. 3, 2024)

Neil Weare (Independent) & Sumaya H. Bouadi (Independent), Overruling the Insular Cases: What About Federal Taxes?, NYU J. L. & Liberty (forthcoming 2026)