Reserve your hotel room for NCTC national conference

You can now reserve rooms at the Adams Mark Hotel in Denver, Colorado. Read all about the Building Prosperity for Working Families Conference, which takes place October 1-2, 2007.

Registration for the conference is planned to open the week of July 9.

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New Working Group leaders

Ever wonder why the IRS changes its forms or procedures? How the Coalition recommends best practices for quality? What you can learn from asset building pilot programs? Behind the scenes are Working Groups.

• The new co-chairs of the Asset Building Working Group are Pam Smith of Community Action Agency, Tulsa, and Rita Eygabroad of United Way of Greater Rochester.
• The new co-chairs of the Advocacy Working Group are Sandra Bernard-Bastien of Children's Services Council of Broward County, Fla., and David Rothstein of Policy Matters Ohio.
• We have reconstituted the Quality Assurance Working Group under the chairmanship of Marshall Hunt of Accounting Aid Society, Detroit.
• Mimi Tuchinetz of Boston EITC Coalition and Marques Benton of the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston continue to co-chair the Scale and Sustainability Working Group.

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Publicize your tax preparation program

Want your program included in the Coalition’s online Program Locator? Submit your 2007 tax season data, and we will list your contact information on our website.

Last year’s data demonstrated that the Coalition is the fourth largest tax preparer in the nation, assisting 310,000 working families to receive over $510 million in refunds.

Tax Year 2005 Return Data
	Number	Value
Federal Returns	309,305	$362,533,238
EITC	—	$182,667,823
CTC	---	$60,341,582
State Returns	206,913	$62,425,875
Prior Year Federal Returns	34,115	$20,211,683
Local and Other Returns	90,932	$74,472,983
Percent of Direct Deposits	35%	—
Average AGI	—	$14,442
Average Federal Refund	—	$1,172
Total Returns	490,308	$517,644,724
Tax Sites	928	—
Volunteers	10,692	—

This year’s survey is much shorter than last year’s and  concentrates on tax services: the number and values of returns, as in the table above. Financial services and asset building data will be collected in a separate survey in a few months.

NCTC uses the data to develop the field of free tax preparation and asset building by:

• Raising funds to support national conference, pilot projects and technical assistance
• Working with affiliates to strengthen and protect the EITC in Congress and state capitols
• lobbying for federal funding for free tax preparation programs

To make it easier for you to extract data from TaxWise (desktop) we provide a data collection tool, a customized report you can insert into TaxWise to report on aggregate data. We also provide instructions for using the tool. We recommend that you download the questions and assemble the data before starting the survey.

Help us help you by providing your data! If you have questions or need assistance, contact Don Wedd at (312) 630-0264 or dwedd@centerforprogress.org

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Tax credit levels for 2008

The IRS has released the thresholds and levels for next year. For example, the maximum income to qualify for EITC for Tax Year 2007 is:

	Married filing jointly	Single or Head of Household
No children	$14,590	$12,590
One qualifying child	$35,241	$32,241
Two or more qualifying children	$39,783	$37,783

More information about the EITC, Child Tax Credit, and personal exemptions can be found in the NCTC Resource Library.

Tax course scholarships coming soon

H&R Block, in cooperation with the National Community Tax Coalition, will provide scholarships to either paid or volunteer staff of Free Tax Preparation organizations across the country to attend H & R Block Income Tax Courses this fall, as they have for several year.

Individuals and organizations with paid affiliation status will receive first priority for scholarships. Are you or your sponsoring organization a paid affiliate of the National Community Tax Coalition? Not sure? Click here to view the current list. Want to pay dues now, before we open the scholarships? Use this webform.

When we open the scholarships in early August, paid affiliates will be notified first.

Workshop on individual tax preparation

To learn more about individual tax preparation and the impact it could have on your clients, join us:

Date: Tuesday, July 24th from 2-3pm (EDT); 1-2pm (CDT); 12-1pm (MDT); 11am-12pm (PDT)

Presenters:

• Mimi Turchinetz, Director Of The Mayor Of Boston’s EITC Campaign, (Moderator)
• Susan Mason, Director of the Intuit Financial Freedom Foundation
• Lee Davenport, EITC Consultant for One Economy Corporation
• PJ Kim, Director of Income Policy at FoodChange

One option available to VITA programs to have an impact beyond the traditional tax preparation model is to enable their low income clients to individually prepare and file their taxes online.  Two efforts in the past tax season highlight some of the challenges and opportunities for scale and sustainability through this avenue. 

FoodChange, based in New York City, partnered with Intuit’s Tax Freedom Project.  The two partners hosted Community Tax Events in which local community organizations, such as high schools and the YMCA, allowed the public to use their computer facilities to access the Intuit TurboTax Freedom Edition.

One Economy facilitated income tax preparation with community partners on theBeehive.org, a website with information and resources about money, health, jobs, school and family.  This year an individual tax preparation opportunity allowed clients with adjusted gross income less than $40,000 to prepare and file their own taxes for free.

Read more about these two programs here.

How did your season go?

United Way of King County, Seattle

• Volunteers prepared 11,288 tax returns and helped return $13.5 million in Federal Refunds to the community, including $4.4 million in Earned Income Tax Credits and $3.2 million in Child Tax Credits.  This was an increase of approximately 40% over last year, assisted by a 30% increase in volunteers
• Increased volunteer training allowed us to include Schedule CEZ
• Expanded Outreach: The Sate of Washington launched a major EITC Outreach Campaign; United Way mailed information to all housing authority residents for the first time and partnered with 2-1-1. 
• We provided close to 50 hours of training for our site managers (using our own training materials). 
• KeyBank provided popular free check cashing vouchers for our tax customers.  Taxpayers could cash their refund checks at any KeyBank branch in three counties. 
• Community Action Agencies followed up with more than 3,000 taxpayers who requested additional services throughout and after tax season. 

(Editor’s note: KeyBank is expanding their program to all their markets. NCTC recently provided KeyBank with contact information for our affiliates in their markets).

C.A.S.H., Rochester, New York      

• Numbers were up 17% 
• The increase in demand occurred primarily in March, due to our lack of volunteers to serve all of the demand in February
• The addition of a quality review training for returning tax preparation volunteers helped augment the efforts of site managers who usually perform this role. 

Quality improves at free tax preparation site, but…

In 2007, 35 percent of returns included a mistake, down from 41 percent in 2006 and 48 percent in 2005.  However, the percent of returns with an incorrect refund – the most serious mistake – actually increased.  It seems to be easier to address less serious mistakes through quality control processes.

This is the conclusion of Amy Brown, who studied quality at tax sites for the Annie E. Casey Foundation.  Fortunately, there are strong clues for how to improve:

• The on-site quality reviews that many sites have implemented seem to really make a difference, especially when done at the computer and using a customized checklist (as opposed to either no checklist or the IRS checklist).  
• Larger sites continue to have better quality results. 
• Very slow preparers and complicated returns (especially Schedule Cs) continue to be red flags for mistakes.

The Telephone excise tax refund posed surprising problems. 

To find out more so you can improve your program next year , read the full report, which is posted on the Coalition website.

Project Manager, EITC Project, Cincinnati

The EITC Project Manager is responsible for overall management of the Hamilton/Clermont EITC Partnership, which includes 16 free tax preparation sites operated by over 100 volunteers. Applicants should send (by U.S. mail, email, or FAX) a brief cover letter explaining the reasons for their interest in the position, a resume, and the names and telephone numbers for two professional references, to:
EITC Manager Hiring Committee
Legal Aid Society of Greater Cincinnati
215 East Ninth Street, Suite 200
Cincinnati, Ohio 45202
staffing@lascinti.org

Communications Manager, Chicago

The Center for Economic Progress seeks an individual to lead and oversee customer service to affiliates of the National Community Tax Coalition (NCTC) and to ensure that the Center maintains constant, high quality communication with the Coalition’s national leaders and local groups. More details at http://www.centerforprogress.org/job.html

Manager, the TANGO Project, Chicago

The Center for Economic Progress seeks a project manager to work with and guide staff, volunteers and partners in the creation of a pilot between the Center and H & R Block. This initial one (1) year pilot will involve utilization of H & R Block tax software in selected Center for Economic Progress tax sites to determine its usefulness and applicability to the organization. More details at http://www.centerforprogress.org/job.html

Tax Program Specialist, Chicago

The Center for Economic Progress seeks an individual to provide support to all aspects of the Center’s tax preparation services within Chicagoland neighborhoods, working out of the Center’s Downtown Chicago office. Responsibilities include program planning and support, data collection, reporting and privacy protection, providing technical assistance to affiliates of the Center’s National Community Tax Coalition and identification and development of local partners and host organizations for tax sites. More details at http://www.centerforprogress.org/job.html

Special Projects Manager, Chicago

The Center for Economic Progress seeks an individual to oversee and coordinate the Foster and Adoptive Parent Tax Program and the Family Child Care Tax Projects. The Manager will also coordinate the volunteer tax training initiatives for the Tax Counseling Project. Duties include recruitment of new community partners; identifying potential training locations; conducting training sessions for Child Care providers, Foster and Adoptive parents; and the dissemination of project materials to appropriate audiences as necessary. More details at http://www.centerforprogress.org/job.html

Low-Income Tax Clinic Manager, Chicago

The Center for Economic Progress seeks an individual to direct the day to day operation of the Center’s Tax Representation Program (Midwest Tax Clinic). This individual will also provide support to the Center’s Tax Outreach and Training programs as well as the Tax Counseling Project. More details at http://www.centerforprogress.org/job.html

EITC Campaign Manager, Seattle

United Way of King County is seeking a highly talented individual to join our Community Services team as EITC Manager to coordinate the operation of the King County Free Tax Preparation Campaign. Apply:   www.prohire.com, Job ID: 419723.

Director of Community Engagement, Philadelphia

The Campaign for Working Families is looking for an energetic person with experience designing and providing training, doing community outreach, and supervision of community cash coaches. More details available from Jean Hunt.