2006 may have been a momentous year for those of you involved in relationships. If you married or divorced during the year, your tax situation changed whether you know it or not.

Relationships and love are two of those great mysteries in life. If you find that magical person, they can grow into a relationship that leads to a joyous marriage. Unfortunately, roughly half of all marriages now fail, a sad statistic if ever there was one. Hopefully, yours does not. If you got married or divorced in 2006, however, you need to keep in mind the event impacts your tax filings.

Lets start off with the happy event. If you were married in 2006, congratulations! Now you need to make some modifications to your tax information. If you take on the name of your spouse, you need to let the IRS know. Ironically, you do this by notifying the social security administration. Hey, it is the government! Nobody said it had to make any sense!

You need to file a form to notify the social security administration. The form is SS-5. You can get it at a local social security administration office. You can get a list of office addresses off the website for the social security administration. Once filed, it takes about two weeks for the information to be updated. If you dont take on the last name of your new spouse, you dont need to do anything.

If 2006 was an unhappy one, you have my condolences. In this case, I am talking about a divorce. A divorce is an unhappy, brutal event. The last thing you want to think about is your taxes, but there isnt any way around it. The primary issue is whether you drop the name of your former spouse. If you take this step, you need to contact the social security administration and file the same form as mentioned above.

Marriage and divorce are two sides of the same relationship. Hopefully, you will only experience one of them. Regardless of where you are in the process, make sure you keep up on your taxes.

Richard A. Chapo is with BusinessTaxRecovery.com - providing information on innocent spouse tax relief.

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