How you can resist funding the government →
a survey of tactics of historical tax resistance campaigns →
counsel people in legal tax avoidance techniques →
Volunteer Income Tax Assistance (VITA) →
what it is, how to volunteer
If you’d like to help take money back out of the government’s accounts and put it back in to people’s pockets, one way you can help is to volunteer at a free tax preparation center for potential earned-income tax credit qualifiers.
Now’s the time to sign up, in time to get trained and ready for when people start arriving with their paperwork.
A lot of people who qualify for the EITC don’t apply for it — either because they don’t know about it, or because they don’t realize that they qualify, or because they get flummoxed by all of the paperwork that the IRS requires.
Tax preparation centers that give free help to low-income people who potentially qualify for the EITC can be found all over the place — do a Google search for one in your area or just keep you eyes and ears open. (Here’s the info for a volunteer training program in San Francisco.)
The government has several billion dollars that it’s taken from the paychecks of people with low incomes via FICA.
It’s willing to give some of this money back via the EITC, but only if these folks figure out the paperwork or can afford to pay someone else to do so.
Many of them don’t and can’t. But every tax season a bunch of volunteers get together all over the country and help thousands of people who qualify for the EITC to fill out their tax forms. In so doing, they take money out of the U.S. treasury (where it would otherwise burn a hole in the pockets of the pork-spenders and arsenal-builders) and give it back to people who need it a lot more than the politicians do.
Do a Google search for “volunteer income tax assistance” (along with the name of your city or state) to find out how to volunteer for .
You don’t have to be a tax expert, and the training is free.
I suggested that folks who like the idea of giving money back to the people the government stole it from should consider volunteering in the VITA program.
In that program, volunteers are first given some basic training in tax preparation and then they help people with low incomes to prepare their tax forms (and, often, to get refunds and the EITC).
I should note that you don’t have to be any sort of tax genius to volunteer for this program:
So each tax return that is completed takes, on average, $1,100 out of the U.S. treasury and puts that money back in somebody’s pocket.
There are far more people who need help filing their returns via VITA than there are VITA volunteers — some of these folks don’t bother to file, or they file simplified returns without using the credits and deductions they qualify for.
If you’re paying taxes this year, VITA is a good way to undo the damage.
Each year, the IRS trains volunteers to help people with low incomes do their taxes.
This helps people with low incomes who otherwise might fail to apply for tax credits that they qualify for, such as the refundable Earned Income Tax Credit.
In , volunteers in the Volunteer Income Tax Assistance program helped 843,803 people fill out their tax forms. This brought $66 million in taxes to the U.S. treasury — but took $996 million back out in refunds.
So on average, each of these tax returns took about $1,100 back out of Uncle Sam’s pocket and put it into the pocket of someone who would spend it more responsibly.
There are far more people who need help filing their returns via VITA than there are VITA volunteers, so if you like the idea of playing Robin Hood, I encourage you to sign up.
You don’t have to be an income tax wizard — they provide free training, and you can volunteer for positions that don’t involve tax preparation directly if you really don’t want to go anywhere near a 1040.
Training usually takes place around December and January.
For information about becoming a VITA volunteer, try calling your local IRS office, or the national IRS tax assistance number at 1‒800‒829‒1040.
I haven’t been able to find a central resource for the program on-line, though if you do a Google search, you will see many regional programs and you can probably refine the search to find one specific to your area.
I’ve volunteered in the VITA program on a couple of Saturday mornings this tax season.
, I have helped nine families take $15,253 back from the U.S. Treasury.
It’s a feather in my cap, Robin Hood style.
If you’d like to get involved, it’s not too late.
You can take an on-line training course from the IRS at http://www.irs.gov/app/vita/index.jsp.
The real trick may be trying to find a VITA site in your area — I don’t know of any central list of nationwide sites.
You’ll just have to Google around, or call your local United Way chapter or maybe your local IRS office.
My next VITA day is .
So I’ll miss the annual Bay Area Anarchist Bookfair and the protest-themed parade that is being held to mark the one-year anniversary of the protest-themed parade which was thrown on the one-year anniversary of the protest-themed parade that also failed to stop the Iraq War.
I recently went to a planning meeting of a local coalition that was hoping to bring the floundering local anti-war movement together to do something.
The “steering committee” itself was over a hundred members large, and still its members (scarred by previous encounters with the hammer-and-sickle crowd) nervously begged for the maximum of democratic inclusiveness.
All of these people, representing almost as many groups — labor unions, leftish and greenish third-parties, liberal peace advocates, would-be Mumia freers, and so forth — testing the limits of compromise and patience to try to come to agreement on the wording of a “Statement of Purpose” and to organize a “Mass Antiwar Conference/Rally” featuring:
Opening keynote speeches
A large assortment of workshops designed to include the broad range of groups and constituencies working against the war
A plenary opportunity to hear reports from the constituent workshops
A plenary session(s) where major decisions about the future of the coalition-in-formation and proposals for future activities would be democratically presented, debated and decided. These would include a proposed mass mobilization against the war.
A mass concluding rally with major speakers and popular antiwar political entertainment and music
Maybe I’m too impatient.
Maybe this is the sort of slow, deliberate, democratic decision-making that effective mass movements require.
To me it seems more like a bunch of well-meaning people putting in a bunch of time and effort to finally decide to all meet up and talk at each other some more in the shadow of “major speakers” and such at yet another failure rally.
The Dubya Squad went from recovering from the shock of to capitalizing on it by bringing the government and the media and the people on-board with their Iraq War agenda in .
, the anti-war movement is still holding massive meetings to draft statements of purpose and plan more meetings to consider proposals for some sort of “mass mobilization against the war”.
I’m for unengulfing that “individual dignity and power” myself.
More of these righteous rallies will not stop the war, no matter what sort of “popular antiwar political entertainment and music” is on the playbill.
The other day I imagined how much worse things would be here (and quite possibly in Iraq as well) if Kerry had won the election.
Half of the people now despairing over the war in Iraq and the U.S. torture policy would instead be making excuses to ignore it, while Kerry, true to his campaign promises, would keep blundering right along, nervously looking for opportunities to demonstrate the testicular fortitude-by-proxy of Democrats in power ties.
Even now, a sad percentage of the alleged opposition are wasting their energies on trying to depose Dubya via impeachment, as though it were in the least likely, as though it would be in the least useful.
Thanks to wood s lot for pointing me in the direction of Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s Fears in Solitude.
If you earned less than $38,348 , you might qualify for the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC) — money the government gives away.
Something like a quarter of those who qualify fail to apply, which is a shame, since I’m sure they could spend the money more wisely than Congress.
To find out if you qualify, how much credit you can expect, and how to apply for it — visit irs.gov (o en español).
If you want to help other people apply for the credit, you can easily become a volunteer tax preparer for the Volunteer Income Tax Assistance (VITA) program — the IRS will train you free-of-charge and you don’t need any prior experience in tax preparation.
This will be .
I helped 17 households take back $20,404 from the U.S. Treasury.
Alas, as far as I can tell, there’s no central on-line resource that can point you to VITA volunteer opportunities in your area.
You might try googling or you can call the IRS at 1‒800‒829‒1040 to find out about nearby sites.
Each year, the IRS trains volunteers to help people with low incomes do their tax returns.
This helps people with low incomes who otherwise might fail to apply for tax credits that they qualify for, such as the refundable Earned Income Tax Credit.
In , volunteers in the Volunteer Income Tax Assistance (VITA) program helped 843,803 people fill out their tax forms.
This brought $66 million in taxes to the U.S. treasury — but took $996 million back out in refunds. So on average, each tax return that a VITA volunteer helped to fill out took about $1,100 out of Uncle Sam’s pocket and put it into the pocket of someone who would spend it more responsibly.
Last year, I volunteered at Arriba Juntos in San Francisco, and helped 18 families take back $10,341 from the government.
The year before, I helped 17 families reclaim $20,404.
There are far more people who need help filing their returns than there are VITA volunteers, so if you like the idea of playing Robin Hood, I encourage you to sign up.
You don’t have to be an income tax wizard — the IRS provides free training, and you can volunteer to help in ways that don’t directly involve tax preparation if you really don’t want to go anywhere near a 1040.
This free training can also be useful to people who want to be tax resistance counselors, or who just want to learn more about the IRS-approved methods of keeping their money out of the government’s hands.
Unfortunately, there doesn’t seem to be any centralized resource you can go to in order to find out how to volunteer in your area.
I’m familiar with VITA programs in my area run through Arriba Juntos and the United Way, but across the country these volunteer programs are run by many different organizations.
The Santa Clara County VITA program seems particularly well-organized, and they offer a registration page on their web site that accepts volunteers from anywhere in the country (they’ll forward your registration information to a national coordinator).
You can also call the IRS at 1‒800‒829‒1040 or contact your local IRS office to ask them to direct you to local volunteer opportunities.
The Volunteer Income Tax Assistance program is a partnership between the IRS and various non-profits and other such groups across the country that trains ordinary schmoes like you and me how to help people fill out their tax forms and then sets up clinics during tax season to do that.
By doing this, the volunteers help many low-income people correctly file for tax credits, like the Earned Income Tax Credit, that can reduce or eliminate their tax liability or even convert it into a tax subsidy.
The vast majority of people who have their taxes filed through VITA receive refunds — refunds they might have failed to apply for without such assistance.
For this reason, tax resisters may want to consider joining up with the program, despite the unseemliness of collaboration with Internal Revenue.
The IRS has released a list of VITA sites if you’re interested.
