[glend]

Hello all. I would like some advice on claiming expenses on an attempted adoption. We are pulling out with an agency due to trust issues that we have and would like to recover the money we will lose which will be around 5000.00. However, my lawyer's CPA is telling him that the adoption has to be finalized to claim it. I live in Florida. Does anyone have a name of a CPA who could call my lawyer (or even if you have just done it and are not a CPA). Our lawyer is a friend of ours and would welcome any input from someone who has done this. Please pm me or post here if you can help at all. We would like to get this all figured out soon so that we know how hard we should fight the agency to recover our expenses. Thanks!! Glenda

[usocwazee]

Trust me we just did it, your adoption does not have to be finalized. We were scammed by a birthmother and claimed every single penny she took us for. Our CPA was not very well versed on the proper procedures either (its not all that common) so I looked on the IRS site http://www.irs.gov/index.html and typed in the word "adoption" Form 8839 instructions http://www.irs.gov/pub/irs-pdf/i8839.pdf - 39.2KB state if you put on page 2 who your agency/and or lawyer was who handled the adoption and the qualified adoption expenses you can claim them. You do not need the childs identifying number that 8839 asks for ( I freaked out a little trying to figure out how I was going to get one then realized I didn't even need it). There are limitations so read carefully but we did meet all the criteria and got every bit of credit we were entitled to. Tell your CPA to do a little more research and good luck.

[glend]

Thank you!

[glend]

Did you claim the expenses the same year they were incurred?

[usocwazee]

Actually no, ours were the year prior so it just happend to work out for us. I never really looked into that aspect of it, but I do believe it has to be the year after they were incurred, but don't quote me on that. Did you check the irs website? It really was pretty helpful. Good luck!