Innocent Spouse vs. Injured Spouse Router
Answer once — find out whether a case calls for Form 8857 (Innocent Spouse Relief, IRC §6015) or Form 8379 (Injured Spouse Allocation, IRC §6402), with the IRC/Rev. Proc./IRM citation shown at every branch, not just the final answer.
How this compares to the IRS’s own tools
The IRS’s own Interactive Tax Assistant (irs.gov/help/ita) has a topic for injured spouse refund allocation (“Can I or my spouse claim part of a refund being applied toward a debt owed by the other spouse?”) but has no topic covering innocent spouse relief at all — a taxpayer who actually needs Form 8857 has nowhere in that tool to even start. Where the IRS tool does have a topic, it answers only its own question and does not show the governing citation behind the answer. This router asks the threshold question first — is this a dispute about a joint liability, or about a refund taken to pay someone else’s debt — before routing into either mechanism’s own test, and shows the citation behind every branch along the way.
This router also does not repeat what the Federal Tax Desk’s own Refund Offset Guide (/taxpayers/refund-offset/) already covers — offset mechanics (IRS-internal offsets vs. Treasury Offset Program offsets) and how to dispute the underlying debt. This tool answers a narrower, different question: which relief FORM applies.