In my case, putting my name as primary and my deceased spouse as secondary also corrected the issue. My spouse died in 2020 before the 2019 joint return was submitted. There were no issues e-filing the 2019 return with TurboTax. I suspect the IRS rejected the 2020 return because they reject a second joint return having the deceased spouse listed as primary. If this is always the case, TurboTax can easily fix the issue whenever the prior year return indicates the primary taxpayer was deceased by automatically swapping the primary and secondary taxpayers on the current return. If this is not a universal problem, there should be an option to make this change after the IRS rejects the return.
TurboTax does not make the process of switching taxpayers easy. I thought I could use a copy the return and simply cut and paste to swap the taxpayer information for primary and spouse. Doing that didn't work because the file still shows the return as being rejected by the IRS. You cannot treat it as an entirely different return and submit from scratch.
My next step was to create a new return, import the taxpayer information from the prior year's tax file, and swap the information listed as primary and spouse. It should have been easy to merely enter the values from the current W2(s) and 1099(s), but swapping names also changed the individual associated with them. My spouse's W2 was listed as mine. Swapping taxpayer names requires deleting the imported W2 information and importing or re-entering the information as a new W2. The 1099s can be corrected by clicking on the appropriate owner. In essence, the only real way to swap the primary and secondary taxpayer on an already completed tax return is to completely redo it.
Why TurboTax associates forms by whether the person on it is primary or spouse instead of tying it to the taxpayer ID is beyond me.
