Question for Maryland practitioners re out of state income

[ejdtaxman]

I practice in NY and most of clients are in NYS so I'm not entirely sure how to deal with this. 

A client of mine is in Princess Anne, MD and her spouse has income from DE. He pays tax on the DE income and receives a tax credit in Maryland against tax paid in DE. However they also have a local county tax against which they get no credit. There was a case a few years ago that I came across in researching this, Comptroller of the Treasury of Maryland v. Wynne , that I believe dealt with this issue - there the Supreme Court decided (long story short) that basically localities can't double tax people this way because it violates the commerce clause. 

However the taxable income flows automatically to the local tax form in the maryland return and the only way I can change it is to override it. So basically I'm wondering 1) is my assesment of this issue correct and 2) if I override and attempt to e-file it will MD reject it?

thank you for your help and any further material you might be able to refer me to. 

[sjrcpa · Accepted solution]

Yes it is the Wynne case.

Credit for DE tax paid by a MD resident can be claimed against both state and local MD tax. But DE tax is very low compared to MD, so the full amount might be used against the state tax with nothing left for local tax. That is the order in which the credits are computed.

Credit is limited to the lesser of MD tax (state and local) on doubly taxed income or tax paid to other state.

[ejdtaxman]

thanks for clarifying sjr. 

[sjrcpa]

You're welcome.

[LilFos]

Hi. I was reading your post on the Wynne case and I am familiar with that. My question is if the Maryland resident who worked in DEL also have the city of Wilmington wage tax withheld AND is reported separately on the W-2 as showing Local tax withheld (W-2 Box 19) how do your apply that on the 502CR without manually overriding the field. And if you do the override I assume you need to mail the return in and not e-file the thing. I do several Del non-resident returns but had my first one with this Local wage tax issue.