Webinar: Tax and Employee Benefits Impact of Supreme Court's DOMA Ruling

The long awaited and long debated decision is in for the Supreme Court vote on the Defense of Marriage Act. Join Ed Zollars on July 17 at 10am for this two-hour webinar as he explains details that will impact your clients.  This CPE presentation was authored by Ed Zollars and developed by Nichols Patrick CPE, Inc.

In the case of United States v. Windsor, the U.S. Supreme Court invalidated the Defense of Marriage Act's provisions that only recognized opposite sex couples as married for all federal law purposes.  Thus, individuals treated as married under state law (regardless of whether couple is same sex or opposite sex) will be treated as married under federal law.

As Justice Kennedy's majority opinion notes, some of the 1,000 federal laws impacted by this definition reside in the tax realm.  The ruling, effectively holding that DOMA was never valid, creates issues both with returns to be filed and with those that have previously been filed.  Similarly, benefit programs that relied on federal law definitions may find their terms retroactively changed.