Early last year, Chicagoan Victoria Stagg Elliott was relieved to put her spouse, Karen Shoffner, on her employer’s health coverage. But there was a catch.

Stagg Elliott found out she would be taxed on the portion of Shoffner’s coverage paid for by the employer. She estimated that the coverage represents about $100 worth of monthly income, meaning she has to declare about $1,200 more in income each year than a straight married colleague with an equivalent insurance package.

“It’s still cheaper than COBRA or an individual policy for my wife, but the bottom line is that it’s unequal pay for the same amount of work,” Stagg Elliott said.

For gay and lesbian couples, aggregate costs of living together without government-recognized marriages often becomes all too apparent at tax time.

There are well over 1,000 benefits afforded to Americans on the basis of marital status. Many of these benefits determine your bill at tax time. In the eyes of the federal government, gay and lesbians are entitled to none.

Last week, Mary Ritchie, a Massachusetts State Police trooper, was among more than a dozen plaintiffs suing the federal government on the grounds that the Defense of Marriage Act denies them Federal Benefits that other couples receive. Ritchie told the Associated Press that, while they’ve been a couple, she and her spouse paid over $15,000 more in taxes than they would have had to had they been able to file jointly.

Mt. Prospect, Ill.-based tax practitioner Michael Simon said that gay couples absolutely have to hire a competent tax professional to work around the difficulties inherent in the tax code. A good tax planner, he added, should be able to save couples money in ways that offset these annual penalties.

When Simon prepares returns for same-sex couples wherein the partners have extremely disparate incomes, for example, he suggests the partner with the higher income file as a head of household and claim the other partner as a dependent. According to the IRS, a person can do that if someone in their household makes less than the standard deduction, among several other qualifications they must meet.

“We usually check the box as ‘friend’ or ‘other,’” Simon said. He added that the best advice for anyone, gay or straight, at tax time is to use a professional preparer. “A good tax professional will save you more than the fee they charge.” According to Simon, the inequities gays and lesbians face at tax time, while significant, pale next to other financial challenges they face, such as those associated with buying property together or working around inheritance taxes.

“The people that I’ve worked with are not that disadvantaged by these (income tax) inequalities,” Simon said. “The IRS has definitely narrowed the advantages of filing as (an opposite-sex) married couple.”

Chicago attorney Roger McCaffrey-Boss, who advises gay couples on tax and financial matters, agreed. He said gay and lesbian couples are more significantly affected by taxable events that, in most relationships, happen just a few times.

“If ‘John’ owns a house and wants to add his partner’s name to the title, the government is going to look at that as a gift,” McCaffrey said. “The same goes if he wants to add his name to a bank account.”

Indeed, the largest cost for gay and lesbian couples might just be finding the time needed to explore their best tax options.

Couples wherein one partner is helping raise the other’s children are especially at a disadvantage. Someone cannot qualify for the Earned Income Tax Credit, for example, based on their raising a non-biological, non-adopted child. Similarly, they cannot increase their standard deduction if they are filing as a head of household on that basis.

Even in situations where both partners can technically claim the children, there will have to be negotiation. “Some couples ask, ‘who will take the kids? I’ll take them this year, you can take them the next year,’” McCaffrey said.

Couples in states that have or recognize gay marriages, civil unions or domestic partnerships unfortunately have additional paperwork to grapple with. They can file a joint return for their state, but they’ll also have to prepare an ersatz joint federal return that calculates their income and deductions filing as a couple.  In the end, though, they still have to file two single-payer returns for the feds.

McCaffrey said it was absolutely necessary for both partners in a relationship to communicate about sharing their assets and consider the long-term implications.

“The biggest mistake I see is couples who have a ‘yours vs. mine’ mentality,” he said. “Partner A makes more money, so he has everything in his name. Partner B quits his job and stays home. They break up and Partner B has nothing.”

“You have to speak up, negotiate and say ‘I’m entitled,’” he added.