When a state’s own tax page is behind its own legislature
We wrote to fifty revenue departments to ask one question, then checked all fifty against their own session law. Eight publish a conformity date their legislature has already moved, or none where one is needed — and in every case the law is right and the page is wrong.
This is a note about method, published because the near-miss
is more useful than the finding. We were establishing, state by state, whether
alimony is taxed the same way it is federally. That turns on a single date: the
version of the Internal Revenue Code a state has adopted. Get the date wrong and
every downstream figure is wrong in a way that looks completely ordinary.
The short version5 points · tap one to jump to it
- What we found — Eight revenue departments publish a conformity statement that is behind their own legislature, or no statement at all where one is needed.
- Why this matters if you are the one divorcing — It is someone typing their state and the word “alimony” into a search box at eleven at night, who has every reason to trust a page on a .gov domain over anything else the search returns — and who is right to, almost always.
- What we did about it — Arizona has not replied yet.
- The states where nothing was wrong — Arkansas, Connecticut, New Mexico, Pennsylvania and Utah are consistent too.
- The other failure: the statute books themselves — Five state legislatures publish a codified statute that is behind their own session law — and that is worse, because a codified statute looks like the most authoritative document on the internet.
In this subject 5
What we found
We have now checked all fifty states this way, each against its own 2025 and 2026 session law. Eight revenue departments publish a conformity statement that is behind their own legislature, or no statement at all where one is needed. Nine more publish nothing, which is defensible where the state is rolling and there is no date to be wrong about. None of them is a scandal.
All three are the ordinary result of publishing being slower than legislating.
That is exactly what makes them dangerous: nothing about them looks stale.
A conformity date is only current if the section carries no pending-session
banner. Read the session law, not the codified text, and not the
department’s explainer.
Why this matters if you are the one divorcing
Because the person most likely to land on a stale state tax page
is not a tax professional. It is someone typing their state and the word
“alimony” into a search box at eleven at night, who has every reason
to trust a page on a .gov domain over anything else the search returns
— and who is right to, almost always.
The federal treatment of alimony reversed in 2017. For
instruments executed after 2018 there is no deduction for the payer and no
income for the recipient. A page written before that reversal, still live, still
ranking, is not a small inaccuracy. Someone could model a settlement on it.
What we did about it
We wrote to both departments, on the day we found each one, and
asked rather than asserted: is this page still operative guidance, or is it
retained as an archive? Both are reasonable answers. Arizona has not replied yet. Minnesota replied the same afternoon, and confirmed it.
Update, 14 September 2026. The Minnesota Department of Revenue told us that Revenue Notice 98-18 has not been archived, and that it only ever applied to Minnesota M1-NR (nonresident) individual income tax returns filed for 1997, and to amended M1-NR filings for 1995 and 1996.
That is a confirmation rather than a correction, and it is worth being precise about what it settles. We were not told we had misread the notice. Both halves of what we published stand on the department’s own account: the page is live, and its subject matter is three tax years in the 1990s. A reader who finds it today, searching an ordinary phrase, gets an official state page that is exactly what it appears to be and nothing like what they need.
We have not corrected either page in our own dataset by
inference. Minnesota’s conformity date is recorded as 1 May 2026 because
the session law says so, and Arizona’s as 1 January 2026 for the same
reason. Where a department described a mechanism without giving a date, the
field stays empty. An empty field is a finding. A guessed one is a liability.
If you maintain one of these pages, or you know of another that has drifted,
tell us. We will read the primary source,
publish what we find with the citation, and name the department that fixed it.
We have no commercial relationship with any state agency, law firm or
tax-preparation company, and we are not asking anyone for a link.
The states where nothing was wrong
Twelve states are consistent: California, Iowa, Kentucky, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, Missouri, New Jersey, New York, Ohio, South Carolina and Wisconsin. Arkansas, Connecticut, New Mexico, Pennsylvania and Utah are consistent too. Connecticut, New Mexico and Utah are rolling — they adopt the Code as amended, with no date, so there is no vintage to fall behind. So is Missouri, which sits in the list of twelve above: § 143.091 adopts the Code “as the same may be or become effective, at any time or from time to time,” and the Department of Revenue confirmed to us on 1 October 2026 that it adopts federal changes in real time. Pennsylvania has no date either, for a different reason: its income tax never incorporated the Code at all. It taxes eight named classes of income under 72 P.S. § 7303, alimony is not one of them, and alimony was never taxable or deductible there in either direction — so there is nothing for a federal change to move. Arkansas is dated but unusual: it adopts individual Code sections at individual dates (§ 179 at 1 January 2022, Subchapter S at 1 January 2019), and none of them moved in the 2025 or 2026 sessions.
We say so because a page that only ever reports hits is a page that is fishing. Four in nine is the finding. Five in nine is the reason to believe it.
The other failure: the statute books themselves
A stale department page is one thing. Five state legislatures publish a codified statute that is behind their own session law — and that is worse, because a codified statute looks like the most authoritative document on the internet.
North Carolina is the sharpest. The General Statutes page for G.S. § 105-228.90(b)(7) still reads “as enacted as of January 1, 2023”, with no banner of any kind, while Session Law 2026-31 moved it to 5 July 2025. Vermont’s online 32 V.S.A. § 5824 still reads 31 December 2024, while Act 164 of 2026 moved it to 31 December 2025. Oregon’s ORS 316.012 still reads 31 December 2023 while Senate Bill 1507 moved it to 2025 — though Oregon’s Department of Revenue page is current, which is the reverse of the usual pattern. Minnesota and Rhode Island are behind on both sides at once.
Minnesota was the one that nearly caught us. We read the codified section, saw 1 May 2023, and came within a click of publishing it over a department’s written answer of 1 May 2026. The banner saying the section had been affected by the 2026 session is the only thing that stopped it. North Carolina does not carry one.
Sources, all read in full rather than summarized:
Minnesota Revenue Notice 98-18, Income Tax — Alimony Payments,
published 8 September 1998 · Minn. Stat. § 290.01 subd. 19(f) and
subd. 31, as published by the Office of the Revisor of Statutes · 2026
Minnesota Laws ch. 128, art. 1, §§ 2 and 3 ·
Arizona H.B. 4168, 57th Legislature 2nd Regular Session, signed 13 June
2026, and A.R.S. § 43-105 · Arizona Department of Revenue,
“Conformity to IRC” · Lunding v. New York Tax Appeals
Tribunal, decided 21 January 1998 · correspondence with the Minnesota
Department of Revenue, 11 and 14 September 2026. The full state-by-state
position is on the alimony tax page.
Dating this page honestly. It was first published on 14 September 2026, and the sources named on it were read in the course of writing it. That is a publication date, not a re-check date — we have not re-read every source since, and we are not going to print a “sources last checked” stamp for a check that did not happen. When this page is next swept against its sources, the stamp will change and say so.