[Natfinwellness] VITA Site Set-Up

[Ann House]

Good afternoon,

What has been your experience(s) with VITA tax prep sites at a college or university? Our SMMC opened in 2010 and we have a facilitated a VITA site on campus each year for student and staff who qualify. It is an FSA, just like Wichita State, which allows us to have fewer tax preparers and allows the tax filer to be more involved with preparing his/her own taxes. We will have some community neighbors also come to our site as they have been referred to us by 2-1-1 as the closest VITA site to them. Our center partners with Beta Alpha Phi (BAP), the accounting club at the Business School for volunteer preparers. They are required to volunteer a set number of hours. Last year we completed 413 resident taxes.
What's required? A good working relationship with BAP, its faculty advisor and the Business School. We secure a computer lab in the Student Union from mid Feb to April 15th for the actual site. This is a generous partnership we have with the Union. We do partner with the state-wide VITA coalition to be included in the state's efforts.
What have been your challenges? International student taxes. BAP students don't want to take the extra training and testing to become non-resident certified. There is no advantage for them to do so and they see themselves doing corporate or personal taxes in the future, not non-residents. We have used Glacier in the past for n-r's but we have found Glacier to be not that easy to use. Dozens of n-r students would flood our office each year asking for help with Glacier and we were unable to assist them beyond the basics.
What have been the successes? Purchasing a Sprintax license for non-resident students. It costs about $3.50 per student, which comes from the International Center on campus. Sprintax has 24-hour hot line assistance and the IRS counts this at VITA since it is facilitated. We completed 890 n-r taxes this past year. Sprintax has been a life-saver for us because of the hot line for questions.
And anything else you can provide! Approach your community VITA and the IRS partners. They lend so much support that it has made our efforts easier. For reporting purposes, we count not only numbers of taxes filed, but volunteer hours and the $ we save students from doing their own taxes, which is $16,500 if students purchase TurboTax at $40 each and that doesn't even count the $ saved if a student went to H&R. BTW, neither TurboTax or most H&R preparers will do n-r taxes. One year I found a fellow at H&R who was certified for 1040NR and he was asking $400/per student.

Ann C. House, MS, CPFC, CEPF
Coordinator, Personal Money Management Center
The University of Utah
Olpin Student Union Building
200 S. Central Campus Dr., #317
Salt Lake City, UT 84112
801-585-3886 (Office)
www.personal-money-management.utah.edu<http://www.personal-money-management.utah.edu/>
[cid:image001.png at 01D20DBD.5B737900]

2015 AFCPE Outstanding Financial Counseling Center

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.osu.edu/pipermail/natfinwellness/attachments/20160913/e46d89fa/attachment-0001.html>
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: image001.png
Type: image/png
Size: 17747 bytes
Desc: image001.png
URL: <http://lists.osu.edu/pipermail/natfinwellness/attachments/20160913/e46d89fa/attachment-0001.png>