Just moved to Florida and am stationed at NAS Pensacola. I want to change my residency to Florida for the tax benefit (no state tax - Maryland creamed me this past year). How do I do it? Thanks.
That's weird. In basic training for the Army, they just had some short DD form to fill out. You just gave an address in the state you wanted residency.
I think you accomplish it when you transfer your driver's license & register to vote at the state license & tag offices. They'll collect some taxes from you at that time (auto related), so that should make you a bona fide resident.
Technically speaking, you can do this. However, legally speaking, military members can be state residents while having drivers licenses from other states. So by the book, you need to go to admin (via student control, if you're in API) and change your legal state of residence in the Navy. Because that state of residence that shows on your LES is technically where you live... NOT where you hold a license.
Not true.
You can get the DD form, fill in any address and state that you want, even someplace that you've never been to and never will go to, and turn it in to Admin/PSD. The Navy won't verify anything, and your LES and DFAS state tax withholding will reflect what you put on the form. This process doesn't necessarely have anything to do with either where you "technically" live or your actual state of legal residence. Filling out the DD form doesn't legally make you a resident of the state that you write on the form- in order to become a resident of a particular state, you need to take actions that show your intent to establish residency in that state.
You are right in that you don't have to have a driver's license from the state that you are claiming as your state of legal residence. However, in order to claim residency in a given state, you need to show that you have substantial ties to that state, and that can be done in a number of different ways, having a driver's license being only one. If you don't have a license from your residency state, though, you better have most of the other bases covered.
I don't know. When I filed my taxes, I checked out the "fine print" and it said that for military, state taxes were filed according to what your military state of residence is.
As for being able to file the DD form for residence anywhere.... not true. At least not here. My roommate tried to change his residency to FL and PSD told him no.... because he lives HERE now. Sounds like your experience is with PS/YNs who didn't do their job. I remember I changed my residence to FL ... before I winged while I was still there, because admin told me I had to do it while I lived there.
Your state of legal residence (not your "military state of residence," whatever that is), is not determined by what you put on the DD form, it's determined by the actions that you take to actually establish residency in a state. The DD form only informs DFAS what you want them to do for state tax withholding. Read the actual form that is linked on one of my posts above.
I'm not sure where HERE is, but any active duty military is not considered a legal resident of the state that they are currently in simply by virtue of having orders to be there. PS/YNs shouldn't be telling any active duty perosn that they can't complete a new DD Form 2058 because they're "here now."