Tom, if you are legally married to a WHO employee, you should now be entitled to work with a CDL.

As for your tax return, it should include your spouse's income, even if her income is tax exempt. The reason is that starting 2-3 years ago, the non-tax exempt income of spouses of UN agency employees is no longer taxed at the tax rate corresponding to your income alone, but it is taxed at a rate corresponding to your joint income. To be clear, only your income will be taxed, but at a higher rate. I can guarantee you that if you do not declare your wife's income, they will come after you and ask you to pay the difference. That happened to a good number of UN staff spouses when the change was implemented and they did not catch wind of it.

Hi JR M, thanks for your reply.

I have heard some people say you put zero for the taxable income of a UN spouse e.g this forum discussion: 

https://www.englishforum.ch/finance-banking-taxation/262461-taxes-un-spouses.html

while some people agree with your comment that the tax rate payable on my income is calculated taking into account the UN income. 

To me it seems that the latter effectively allows taxation the UN salary by increasing the tax burden on the non-UN salary.  This is especially true where the UN spouse earns significantly more than the non-UN spouse.

I am struggling to find any official guidance or first hand experience of people in my situation in Geneva. May I ask if you have direct experience of this yourself?

Cheers

Tom, the entries in the Forum that you refer to are from 2011 and 2010. If you read my post, you will notice that the changes in Swiss tax policy were implemented 2-3 years ago.

But why don't you do what you should have done to begin with and ask the Tax office directly? If you are struggling with "official guidance" it is probably because you have not gone to official sources.

This is the problem with seeking answers to serious problems in Forums, instead of going to the those who make and implement policy and who will be looking, in this case, at your tax returns. I read people posting questions here about immigration, visas, health insurance, employment, rental policy, etc, instead of going to the entity in question, which determines the policy, and only manage to confuse themselves.

And yes, I would not offer my comments if I had not had direct experience with this. But that is irrelevant, really, because you do not know my specific circumstances or those of anyone posting.

Stop searching for the answer you want and find out what the real answer is. Go to the official source.

And I know from "direct experience" that the WHO has an excellent Human Resources department, and a staff association. They are both familiar with this issue as the change of policy caused quite a stir a couple of years ago. Your wife can just walk over to HR when she is at work and get a solid answer from them.

Hi. I was wondering about this too. Did you ever get a clear and definitive answer?