Filing when a spouse has passed away

[hantseast]

I am trying to prepare a return for a married couple and one has passed.  How can I file them together so all the information does not have to be inputted again?  When I try to transfer from last year, the instructions say to uncheck the checkbox of the taxpayer whose information you do not want to transfer then select ok, and if you are uncoupling because of a death, follow this process again.  However, you cannot get back to that page again.  I also found this from Turbotax: 

   "The rule that governs is:  Taxpayers who do not remarry in the year their spouse dies can file jointly with the deceased spouse."   So, does this mean that I can file them jointly because the surviving spouse did not remarry?  I want to be able to transfer spousal credits and pension income splitting, and not sure how this will work if I need to file separate returns.

[TurboTaxSusan]

You are looking at information from the US version of TurboTax. In Canada, if your spouse has passed away, your marital status would be “widow”, not “married”, so you can’t prepare your return with your spouse. You can still transfer credits and do pension splitting. 

[hantseast]

Thank you - it would be so much simpler to do them together - there is so much going back and forth that I'm getting dizzy!

[cludikar]

I agree with you  - this is crazy.  My wife passed just before Christmas, so she was alive for virtually the whole year.  Now that I'm classified as a widow it appears that Turbotax Canada has made life unnecessarily hard.  In the form they want information from Line 23600 of T1 and line 68360 from T1206 from your spouses return (it goes both ways too!).  Of course there's no obvious way to find either of these lines in the on-line pages.  These returns should be linked until the last minute.  Not impressed!

[hantseast]

Totally agree - it is so unnecessarily cumbersome, and it doesn't have to be!  I can understand having to mail the deceased person's return, but this whole separation thing shouldn't be so tedious.