Several years ago Gill v. OPM ruled that DOMA was unconstitutional in the 1st District. Then the court determined that DOMA would only be constitutional if there were a compelling reason to discriminate. After due consideration of any compelling reasons to discriminate, I came to the conclusion that DOMA would not be able to overcome that standard. At that time I started filing people "married filing joint" if they benefited from doing so, and went back and put protective claims in for people as far back as 2008 if they would benefit. So the short version is that I don't have any clients where I did both spouse's returns that need to amend an old return to file jointly; if it benefited you, we already did it. Happily, no one is being forced to amend to file jointly if they don't want to (and most people don't want to - more on that below.)
But it turns out there's ANOTHER reason to amend your old returns. If you were someone who got health insurance for your spouse through your workplace, you had a weirdness on your W-2 that we can now go back and change, and with the new W-2s in hand, amend 2010, 2011 and 2012. Apparently, no one is being forced to be consistent in their tax treatment. What that means is that you can still amend your 2010 return to show lower income on a revised W-2 without having to amend to file jointly.
Basically, if you had imputed health insurance on your W-2 there are good reasons to ask your employer to revise your W-2s. This pertains to you if you had "imputed income" from your employer's share of your spouse's income AND if you paid for your spouse's insurance out of your own payroll deductions, too, since now we can revise your W-2 to show that those expenses should have been before Federal taxes, Social Security Taxes and Medicare taxes. The procedure is that you need to get a revised W-2 from your employer for 2010, 2011 and 2012. We have time to fix 2011 and 2012, but 2010 is going to expire soon so it's good if we can get that moving ASAP. Ask me if you need help, or check out this paper on how to do it. https://www.talx.com/News/TaxIntelligence/2013-10-ETS-Tax-Intelligence-DOMA.pdf
If I didn't do both returns for you and your spouse there is a possibility that you might wish to amend 2010, 2011 and 2012 to file jointly. Most of the time we find people have a better outcome if they file as two single people, but there is one scenario where you save on taxes if your marriage is recognized: where you earn very little and your spouse earns quite a lot. So two people making $40K would have higher taxes if they marry, but one person making $70K and another making $10K would be better off at tax time because of being married. (Sorry, married people, Married Filing Separately is usually the worst of all the options.) You are considered married based on your status on December 31st. If you are a situation where I didn't already do both tax returns AND you have uneven incomes, give my office a call to schedule some time to explore whether we want to amend old years. Again,2010 is the time-critical one; the chance to amend it expires on 4/15/14 unless you filed for an extension in 2010. Note that it's a good idea to ask for the W-2 to be revised first and do both amends at once.
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