The following is excerpted from a paper by Edwin Davis and delivered at the 2014 Advanced Family Law Course in San Antonio. The complete paper can be downloaded here.

Evaluation of the financial condition of parties in a family law case can become a very detailed undertaking. As family lawyers, we need a starting place to assist us in the discovery process – request for production, interrogatories, depositions, etc. Overall, our best roadmap is the parties’ tax returns.

Year in, year out, parties must report their income and deductions to the Internal Revenue Service, and state their income source and category of deductions, under penalties of perjury. This article will examine the types of tax returns most commonly encountered in preparation of your family law case, and discuss how to read and obtain information from those returns.