Make Tax Season Work for You – Live Webinar Transcript 2.3.16
Good afternoon everyone. Thank you for joining us today for our financial wellness webinar, make tax season work for you. Free tax preparation services. Today's webinar is sponsored by a court of therapeutics -- Acorda therapeutics. The audio is being broadcast are your computer. Please make sure your speakers are turned on. You can control the audio podcast via the audio podcast panel. If you accidentally -- broadcast panel. If you accidentally closed the panel you can go to the top of the screen and choose audio podcast. If you do not have sound capabilities on your computer, we have provided the phone number for you. Real-time captioning is provided during this webinar. The captions can be found in the media viewer panel in the lower right-hand corner of the platform. If you do not see the captions, you may need to open the media viewer panel by selecting the media viewer button in the upper right-hand corner of the webinar platform. If you want to make the media viewer panel larger, you can minimize other panels like chat, Q and A or participants. We want you to submit questions during today's webinar, so to provide those, please use the chat box or the Q and A box to send the questions you have. The questions will be directed accordingly during the Q and A portion. If you are listening by phone and are not logged into the webinar, you may also ask questions by emailing your question directly to . if you miss anything today, this webinar is being recorded and the materials will be placed on our website on if you experience any technical difficulties use the chat box or email the host. I will be your mother later today. My name is Elizabeth. -- I will be your moderator today. My name is Elizabeth. I love doing these webinars because most of the folks here will be individuals who are living with a disability or chronic health condition, and it is such a pleasure to have the opportunity to speak directly to you rather than speaking to other folks in the disability services field. So thank you again for joining us today. It is our pleasure to have you with us. Today we are going to talk a little bit about financial wellness. Then we will hear about favorable tax positions and free tax services from our partners at IRS. Then we are going to talk about MyFreeTaxes. We will leave lots of times for questions and answers. So please don't hesitate to send questions in through the chat or Q and A. We will leave you with some suggested next steps you can take to put everything you learn together to action in your life. I want to say a special thank you to our sponsor to sponsors a financial wellness webinar series. For those of you who are new to the series, national disability Institute is a national research and development organization. Our mission is to promote income preservation and asset development for persons with disabilities and to build better economic futures for all Americans with disabilities. We do this because the national poverty estimates for people with disabilities are not looking so good. For individuals without disabilities in 2013, about 12.5% had income below the poverty level over a 12 month period. For folks with disabilities, that amount was more than two times great. It was 28.2%. The Americans with disabilities act revived several things to individuals -- provide several things including insurance equality of opportunity, will participation, independently than -- living and economic self-sufficiency. And that is our mission. We have made tremendous strides in several aspects promised under the Americans with disabilities act, and we have not focused as much on economic self-sufficiency. So we hope some of our efforts like today's webinar will support you in building your own economic self-sufficiency and supporting others in doing so as well. Let's take a moment to talk about financial wellness. We define financial wellness as the state of a person's finances with the intent of working towards financial behaviors that limit stress and the impact of stress on one's daily life. There is a tremendous amount of research that shows that financial stress can have a huge impact on health, our ability to function daily, and especially on her ability to be effective at work. Financial wellness can have many components. It's financial literacy, using affordable financial services, and staying away from predatory financial services. It is utilizing favorable tax positions which we will talk about today. Budgeting, understanding public benefit rolls, and the impact of earning and saving money on those benefits which he talked about in our last webinar. You can check that out in art webinar archives. -- Our webinar archives. Financial wellness is also about building and maintaining assets, and if you are on the line and not sure how to do that based upon some benefit that may have an asset limit, please reach out to us. There are several ways you can do that, and we would like to share that information with you. It is also accessing things that can support you in building your financial wellness such as accessing available health care subsidies and understanding work and your long-term disability options. We have many webinars in our archives on our website through the financial wellness wellness webinar series. We did most of these topics. If it is something we did not have a chance to share yet, please reach out to us so we can share information with you or help you secure resources. I touched upon this a little bit, but financial wellness is important because it impacts both your mental and physical health, and I know many folks on the line who are living with a chronic health condition know how important it can be to reduce stress and to have things as organized and as flowing properly as they should as you can so that you can meet those different health needs as they come up. Financial wellness positively impact your self-concept, it feels great when you complete one of your financial goals or when you know that you are moving forward in the best way possible taste on -- based on your current situation. It changes your status with other community stakeholders. It is really hard to participate if you don't have the finances to do so. And it directly impacts the quality of life and a lot of ways, not the least of which is having the opportunity to live the life which we desire for ourselves. We did some research on financial wellness and people with disabilities with our partners and here is a little bit of what we found. Through this research we found that over 50% of households earn less than $35,000 annually. 1644% earned less than 50,000 that more than 35,000. So that leaves a large portion of people, almost 30%, who are living with an annual income below $35,000 and those are all households with an individual living with multiple sclerosis. When asked about the ability to pay all of their bells, one third -- bells -- bills almost half report a very difficult time in 43% reported that their financial status has affected their ability to access medical care at some point. We have some new data we're developing that looks at medical debt and disability, and we are finding very significant differences between people with disabilities and those without and their level of medical debt. Obviously being much higher. We also in our survey conducted found that individuals with MS indicated that they do not have enough savings to cover three months expenses. And that was about 72%. 67% reported that their finances were worse since their MS diagnosis. And almost 74% reported that they were not aware of our had not used different financial stability programs such as the earned income tax credit which we will talk about today, individual development accounts, the family self-sufficiency program which is available to folks who are living in public housing, and Social Security for achieving self-support. We shared information about each of these through the financial wellness webinar series. And you can check out the archives to access that information, and you are always welcome to reach out to us to learn more. I want to give you a very quick visual of the different financial wellness strategies that exists. I will read them very quickly for anybody who would benefit from that. There is financial education, budgeting, credit repair, and we do have research that shows that about actually almost half of individuals in a household headed by a person with a disability are either -- either have a bank account but still using alternative financial services. Other financial wellness strategies are the use of work incentives, Social Security incentives, tax incentives, along with volunteer income tax assistance in the earned income tax credit. State Medicaid buy-in programs which for those of you who are living with a disability and are working, or thinking about returning to work, these are not quite yet available in every state, that many states have the option where you can buy into the Medicaid program when you're assets or earnings push you out of the regular Medicaid eligibility. There are other strategies such as the family self-sufficiency programs, individual development accounts, assistive technology loans, student loans, portal trust, and able accounts. All of which are ways you can either access funds or save money without it negatively impacting a public benefit. Postsecondary education, employment, self-employment, micro-enterprise, short and long-term savings, and homeownership. We describe as multiple ways you can improve your own personal assets. In the bottom we have some strategies you may need if you fall into trouble along the way. There are protection and advocacy available to people with disabilities in every state. Taxpayer advocates, which are also available in every state. Credit counseling which sometimes gets a pretty bad name, but there are really wonderful programs out there provided by nonprofits. If you need a referral to a legitimate credit counseling organization to let us know. Volunteer income tax assistance which we will discuss today. And work incentive planning and assistance programs which are there to help you better understand your Social Security disability insurance or supplemental security income. And the impact of work on those benefits. Forgive me if I went too fast, I am very excited to hear from our wonderful partner at the IRS SPEC who will share with you some information about favorable tax provisions as and strategies you can take this tax season to get your taxes done for free.
> Thank you. I am a senior tax analyst with the stakeholder partnership and education and communication. We were given a long name a few years ago. I mostly work with national partners that work with people with disabilities such as NBA I -- NDI and also oversee the veterans program as well. I want to tell you a little bit about our organization. We have a long name. We serve mostly be low to moderate income taxpayers including people such as senior citizens, people with disabilities, people with limited English proficiency and Native Americans. We want to help populations by informing them of various credits and deductions that they are entitled to and also help them receive free tax preparation assistance. What the taxpayer receives the refund, our next goal is to help them find ways to help them increase their income and build savings. We also oversee the volunteer income tax assistance program and the tax counseling for the elderly program along with a $12 million a year grant that we provide to organizations to help provide these services. We did receive additional funding this year from Congress that will go into effect next year. The increased it to $15 million for these services. We basically have a three-pronged approach business model of income tax preparation, education outreach and financial outfit -- building information. We provide leverage benefits to millions of taxpayers through national and local partners to actually are the ones who deliver most of these programs and services. We know from research that the market for free tax preparation services is very substantial. It is approximately about 16 million about 16,000,000 to 90,000,000 people who would meet the free tax preparation criteria. Based on research and everything else, we feel that the 16 million that are available, we feel that number is probably a little bit lower. This is conducted a few years ago by different organizations and studies. What we do know, last year over 90,000 volunteers prepared more than 3.7 million returns and provided over $4 billion in refunds. That was at over 12,000 sites nationwide. Just as importantly, it saved more than $2.9 million in tax preparation fees by people who normally would go to a preparer. We feel that the amount of free tax preparation programs that we have the people who qualify for services should not have to pay. There will always be exceptions to the world. If you have a little bit more complex return, but for the most part, if you have a basic return, we will take our volunteers that are IRS certified, and we look at the quality rates among them, which was 98% last year, versus people in some of the other organizations where it was much lower percentage wise. Mostly because we provide much more training than some of the other preparers do, especially people that just do this during the filing season and then are off to maybe another job. This morning I did go online just to look up and see how many people have filed to date, and as of midnight last night there was about 23 million people who have filed. The majority of those people have gone to H&R Block and other preparers. I look at the numbers, and I see the commercials. I am sure you do as well, and they look nice and say they will get you a maximum refund, but I assure you that going to a free tax preparation service cannot only provide you with free tax preparation, that many of the coalitions and partners that we have out there also have all types of other plans that can be set up, financial services, starting a checking account for free, along with other asset building programs, and I think later on in the presentation you will hear from other people at NDI talking about those services. Our main service and signature program is the volunteer income tax assistance program. This started over 40 years ago. At the time we just did a small amount of returns each year because it was something that mostly IRS people were doing and volunteering on their own time. It has expanded over the years from doing a few hundred returns to almost 3.8 million a year. So it is a -- this is where you sit face-to-face across from someone who is usually located at community centers like United Way. Services are available generally to people whose income is $54,000 and below. I don't want to get into this too much because it can cause some issues, but basically, this is just a guideline, that $54,000. What the threshold for the EITC is. Does it mean if you go to a site that they will turn you away if your income is $60,000 as long as everything else is in the scope. That is at the discretion of every site out there. This is just a general guideline. All our volunteers are certified, and we especially want people to claim earned income tax credit and other credits, and that's why we have this program because we know so many people are not, and I will talk about that later. All the services of course are free and partners are not allowed to charge anyone for any of these services. The other program going on for many years, this actually started prior to the volunteer income tax business program. It was started by AARP volunteers. If the tax counseling for the elderly program. It is very similar to the VITA, accept the majority of sites are operated by AARP foundation tax aid program. They do prefer or cater to people 60 years of age or older. They also have special knowledge about pensions and retirement issues unique to seniors. Again, these are IRS certified volunteers. As well as AARP volunteers who generally receive a stipend for travel, but that is all they really get as volunteers. They cannot accept anything else. If you are not 60 years of age and go to a tax counseling for the elderly site, even if you got there first, if someone comes up while you are waiting, they would get to go in front of you. So this is a good incentive if you are over the age of 60 to go to one of the tax counseling for the elderly sites throughout the country.