2016 Taxes and the college student......

Are you listing him as a dependent on your taxes? If so, you would enter that information onto your taxes. I used TaxAct and it pretty much walked me through how to enter my child's 1098-T onto my 1040. The 1098 will show tuition paid and any grants/scholarship amounts received.

YES - you do have to claim it as income - DH ended up paying taxes his first year of college because he didn't realise that and didn't adjust his withholdings to reflect it (he sure did the next year though)

DS paid his own way through college and was working part-time so he filed his own taxes - we still claimed him as a dependent (he still qualified) so he had to tick the box on the tax forms where he was claimed as someone else's dependent. I don't remember doing anything with the education credit - sorry - I suspect we didn't qualify

Got it. So you are trying to determine who can take the educational credit if your son claims the difference in scholarship/grant money on his taxes. Are you doing your taxes online? I know that certain companies, depending on which one you are using, have free helplines and would likely better answer that question; however, I would assume the person taking the education credit has to the be the same one who would be claiming the 1098T information being that tuition paid is listed on that form.

It's for the calendar year.

The 1098-T form is almost useless. Most schools use Box 2 (amounts billed) because it is easier, but that will be the amount the school billed during the calendar year which may not be what you paid - for example, if the school billed in Jul & Dec and you paid in Aug and Jan, then they are reporting 2 semesters of billing, but you only paid for 1 semester. I assume the scholarships reported on the form would be on the same schedule as the billing. It's probably easier to print out a detail of your student's account and add up the total you paid and the total scholarships received. Scholarships for tuition & required fees are considered qualified scholarships and are not taxable; scholarships for other expenses are taxable.

Do you use Turbo Tax or something like that? We switched to a CPA due to complexities with DH's travel, but before that we used turbo tax and it seemed to walk me through everything. If it doesn't do a good job of that, then I would suggest checking in with a tax prep company.

Actually, that is not always the case. The ones I have seen this year are for Fall 2016 and Winter 2017, which was billed in December. There is a checkbox on the form that indicates that.

Where does one get a 1098? My son's mailing address is listed as our address even though he lives at school. We haven't received anything from the school and he says there isn't anything in his online student account. I suspect we won't qualify for anything, but I'd like to have it just in case.

In have a question, too. My HS Jr and HS Sr are dual enrolled through their schools at the local community college. We pay for nothing except books (and only for one of the kids at that). The high schools pays the tuition. However, the kids received the 1098. Since this is not something we actually paid, we should not be including this when we file our taxes, right? Or should we?