Please stand by for realtime captions. > Thank you for joining. We will begin momentarily. > > This is the national disability Institute. We will give everyone a couple of four minutes to get on the webinar. We had very -- a lot of people register. We stand by and we will be in and a few minutes. -- And we will begin in just a few minutes. Thank you very much. > We are going to get started. We had a few people with difficulties signing on. I will get started with the housekeeping. My name is Katie for the national disability Institute. Welcome to the 2012 webinar series. The webinar is parts should bite think of America and Wal-Mart. We thank them for their continued support. As you listen to the webinar, we have a new format. The audio for today's webinar is being broadcast through your computer. If you are listening through your computer, make sure your speakers are turned on and headset plugged in. Can listen to the webinar on the telephone I done in the number on your screen. 877-668-4490. Meeting code 966 029 917. No entity ID is needed. -- Attend the ID is needed.
The webinar housekeeping. In the lower right-hand screen of your screen, we have close captioning available participants who are deaf or hard of hearing. You can close it down if you are not wanting to use the box. By minimizing the multimedia window or make a multimedia window larger by minimizing the Windows about it. If you experience technical disabilities use the chat box to send the message from the --. You are welcome to e-mail myself and you have might address from a the invitation.
For questions and answers, use the chat box to send questions during the webinar to Nakia or myself. We would direct questions accordingly to the presenters.. Several presenters are on today. Want to make sure we get as any questions in today. If a state by phone him a you can ask questions by e-mailing them directly to me. > Please note the webinar is being recorded and the materials will be placed on the website. With that I am going to turn it over to our colleague, our national program director.
Thank you Katie and thank you all for joining today for today's webinar. Today's webinar is entitled best practices from the field. 2012 tax season recap. This has been a very busy tax season. Similar to last year. In the past -- Katie mentioned I am Michael and I am the national program director for the real economic program tour. Today's webinar is sponsored by Wal-Mart and Bank of America. I would like to give special thanks to them. For sponsoring the webinar series this year. I would also like to thank our national partner the Internal Revenue Service.
Without their support we would not have the real economic impact that we really appreciate. For those of you who may not be familiar with the National Disability Institute. We are a national research and development organization. Our mission is to provide income presentation -- preservation. We are working to build a better economic future. We support our mission at the National Disability Institute in a variety of ways. Our signature project is a real economic impact.
The real impact tore is a national initiative to build disability tax assistance, financial education and asset building opportunities for persons with disabilities through trusted networks. With many of you who are on the phone, our partners of the real economic tour and are doing an amazing work. We are excited this year, we get to share some of these best practices with each of you. > I would like to thank our national sponsors. Wal-Mart Bank of Americaand [ Indiscernible name ]. The Institute for economic in. And the Internal Revenue Service. Before we get started with our program apply to recognize my colleague at the national disability Institute. For working on the real economic tour. Katie and Nakia.
Today we are joined by representatives from the IRS and real economic impact tour partners. For best practices, lessons learned and new opportunities to share with us today. Amazing work is taking place across the country to build a better economic future for persons with disabilities. I am excited that we have these opportunities to share with you today. There are more best practices to share. We have put them all in this webinar today. I encourage you to sign up for the real economic impact tour listserv where you will be able to communicate with your colleagues from across the country and see additional best practices that are taking place.
With that I would like to turn it over to our first presenter. Richard Keeling senior tax analyst with the IRS. A good friend to the national disability Institute. Richard, I will turn it over to you.
Thank you Michael. Hello everyone. I won't take up as much time. I will just give you some basic information regarding some of the data for have this year. Then talk about a few things that we have in the works for next year. First, I want to thank all of you out there. And the things you did whether outreach, tax preparation, asset building opportunities. Thank you for everything you have done for persons with disabilities. And the general underserved in general. We really appreciate that.
That includes all of our field
Personnel attending the webinar. I am having a bit of trouble with the slides. > Just some basic statistics. If anyone on the call is blind or vision impaired. I will just hit the high numbers we did. We been our partners prepared apostolate $2.2 million in federal tax returns which brought back $3 million in refunds. These are increases from last year. As far as the number of people with disabilities. Under partially of the number we have on the screen 559,000, is incorrect. We found this out last week. We don't actually know the number yet. We are working to get that. We hope it is going to be an increase. I believe it will be.
Unfortunately when I prepared this last week for the webinar. That was the number we had. I was told it was good. We have since found out it was not. We hope to have that shortly. Having said that, we had approximately 13,000 sites this year. Including 500 facilitated San Francisco sites and 62 virtual sites. I will not talked much about that since we will have another presenter speaking about that. I wanted to mention the 2012 year is a baseline year for our virtual. And we have processes in place to segment the virtual returns for upcoming years.
Another thing I want to mention. A huge success with the launch of the site on IRS.gov. This was launched earlier in the year with approximately 5000 sites that were available. None ARB sites specifically. It had great features especially the global map feature where you could use the tool to map out where your closest site once. And the great thing about this site is it updated at least twice per week. And that is a huge increase on what we used to have. Where it would update maybe once per week at best.
The site locator is open the rest of the year as well. Now I have -- with some of our filing information. I want to talk about some of the things. Since filing season ended we are already working on the next season. We do that with things I think that most people will find successful. Going forward.
First of all the grants which is currently open, hopefully many of the people on the call have applied for the grant or received a grant in the past. They were called last week. If you did not have a chance to participate the calls or answer questions, let me know and I will beat you information.The Vita grant was moved up a month. So the money could be or if they could announce the award recipients. It little bit earlier. So this year the award announcements will be in October. 1 October.
We did have 371 applicants last year requesting dirty $3.3 million and 213 recipients were all awarded a $12 million. As far as the text counseling for the [ Indiscernible name ] grants, there were 48 applicants requesting 8 million and 8,000,030 recipients that received $5.6. We don't know about the funding for the TCP grants. That is contingent upon budget for next year which is still working its way through Congress.
I want to talk to you about some of the upcoming opportunities and changes. As we know, anyone associated with tax preparation this year, saw problems with text wise online. One of the things we are working with, with tax wise is a contingency plan for future outages. That would have the opportunity to work off-line.
If in factthe tax wise did go down online. We are in the beginning stages of that and we hope to have more information by the end of this month. Another thing that will be available is communication tools from tax wise. They are exploring the capability of this proposal. This would have permanent information for our volunteersfor Vita and some of our other volunteers that are in taxable assistance.
We hope this communication tool, we think will will be an excellent resource for volunteers and it will make information more assessable. We will also have a quality assurance monitoring. Which is our software vendor to be held to a performance standard. And face repressions if -- repercussions if they did not have performance. They did not meet their for -- performance standards.
This is a good thing as well. A little more accountability. Other things we will be doing our talking more about the alternative filing methods. We hope to map -- wrap this up and get self assistance.The virtual Vita things in place. We also want to have more effective strategies for outreach. About facilitating assistance andvirtual Vita. We do hope to do extensive marketing and have a outreach plan in effect to share with everyone by June 30 regarding alternative filing season happens.
In addition, we hope our products and training is up to everyone's standards. Our commitments are the same. Your be some products that are under consideration as far as electronic only versions. However, as I said. We want to make sure to divide all of our partners with the best possible resources up there. One addition to the link and learn enhancement, there will be an instructor PowerPoint out there that will be available. In addition to the instructor lesson plan. That is just some of the things coming up. With that I just want to say, thank you for everything you have done. You made a difference in this filing season. Again we had an increase from last year.
We hope that you will continue to exceed our expectations again next year. So thank you and I will turn it over toMichael or persons with disabilities.
-- Michael or Katie.
Thank you. We will open this up for questions after the event. Or after each presenter has spoken. Then people can ask questions. Next is Katie Lyons. Who is with the creating assets savings and hope campaign. With the United Way of Buffalo and you're a County. She is going to share information with us. I apologize for the technical difficulties that we are having.
I will face -- I will be changing the slides for Katie. Katie. I will turn it over to you.
Thank you so much. Just a little brief history. In 2009 we received any grant -- many grant from the National Disability Institute for an effort called make efforts pay. A handful of coalitions across New York State working to increase the number of clients who had a disability or lived with someone who have a disability and utilizing our tech services. The goal is to increase that number by 10%. Our core mission. What we do is collect information on paper intake. It is something that we stuff into the federal intake. That is what we use to collect our data. That is what we have been using. Halfway through the filing season, might I areas
For presented his said let's pull this number from tax wise. Maybe two years ago it was a different number. 14 or 15. A disability question, do you or does someone in your household have a disability? I said, that seems like a good idea. Probably a more accurate read. Considering every taxpayer is sitting there and should be entering -- answering this question. We came to a realization that she had reported that's -- this number was incredibly low. The person who wrote of the software to all of our computers did not make the field mandatory. It is a mandatory field.
By the IRS and certainly something that we were counting on. It over for us to determine what those numbers were. Which let us -- lead us to another conversation. Not just, why was the software not uploaded properly but why are people not answering this question? Even if it is not a mandatory field, it is still a question. Why aren't people asking it?
In having the conversation, it was our workgroup. Our disability workgroup had been meeting. I took this back to them. They had urged me to connect with people who operate all of our vita site. I just said ask them. Why are they not asking the question? It was brought to our attention that people felt uncomfortable about asking the question. They didn't want to say they had a conversation about the issue.
All different sorts of excuses for why this volunteer was not doing their job. Which obviously was a problem for us because we were relying on the information to determine our success. That is when, at our disability workgroup, we started brainstorming. What can we do to fix this?
In a matter of one meeting, we got talking and for some -- I'm not sure how it came up. I can't return to the conversation. It was some time ago, we decided on sensitivity training. At that time our workgroup was comprised of several members of our local self advocacy association. Who had said that they actually host cable television shows. They had access to the studio and a video camera.
We thought that would be a great project to work on. Not only would be be educating the volunteers but it was more an empowering type of opportunity for the people who have been a part of our community to say, we want to make a change.