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) → low-accuracy work by

I’ve finished my initial set of classes for the Volunteer Income Tax Assistance program. I hope to be able to help a bunch of people get their money back.

According to an audit of IRS Taxpayer Assistance Centers (TACs) , programs like VITA can be more helpful than they are correct or accurate:

, Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration auditors made 34 anonymous visits to 26 TACs nationwide in an attempt to have a tax return prepared. These visits resulted in 23 prepared tax returns. Results show taxpayers do not always receive proper and accurate customer service assistance during tax return preparation.…

IRS employees incorrectly prepared 19 (83 percent) of the 23 tax returns prepared during our visits. If 17 of the 19 incorrectly prepared tax returns had been filed, the IRS would have incorrectly refunded approximately $32,000. If the remaining 2 incorrectly prepared tax returns had been filed, the IRS would have inappropriately withheld $2,400 in tax refunds.

Note that this is an audit of IRS employees in IRS TACs — the volunteer programs like VITA are a second line of defense, staffed by people like me, who are amateurs with only a couple of classes to back us up. I wonder whether we’ll be able to compete with the IRS employees’ 17% accuracy rate.

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:

The Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration had 35 dummy tax returns prepared at “VITA” sites . Exactly none of the returns were prepared correctly. But don’t worry — VITA only prepared 843,803 returns last season.

The Inspector General’s report notes:

The tax returns filed by these 843,803 taxpayers involved refunds of approximately $996 million and liabilities of approximately $66 million.

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.

I’m a fan of the VITA program, in which the IRS trains volunteers like me to help low-income people fill out their tax forms.

The reason why I’m enthusiastic about working arm-in-arm with the tax collector is that most of these low-income filers are filing for refunds, and that if they fail to file — or fail to get help applying for the deductions and credits to which they are legally entitled — they leave their money in the government’s hands. And the way I see it, that’s a dangerous place to leave your money.

Anyway, one of the drawbacks of relying on an army of quickly-trained volunteers to help people navigate the notoriously labyrinthine tax code is that they will frequently screw up.

The Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration developed two model taxpayers with certain typical characteristics and used these taxpayers to test a set of VITA volunteers. Only 39% of the resulting tax returns were prepared accurately.

This isn’t a good thing, even though the errors were usually beneficial to the taxpayer:

In the sampling of hypothetical returns, taxpayers would have gotten a total of $31,828 more than they should have.

In the few cases when taxpayers were deprived of benefits they should have gotten, those taxpayers would have paid $4,411 more in taxes than necessary.

The taxpayer is the one who will be held responsible for the errors, not the volunteer tax preparer (who is typically anonymous anyway). It is unlikely that the IRS would bring down the hammer on someone for having had the bad luck of having been assigned to a bumbling volunteer, but they will correct the forms and lower the refund if they catch errors.

Any low-income filer who anticipated a big refund only to have that refund chopped down by an IRS computer will be very disappointed, or worse if they’ve already made purchases in expectation of the refund.

But I hope this news encourages more people to become volunteer tax preparers — if you’re worried you’ll make mistakes, well, consider that par-for-the-course. And remember that even the IRS’s own employees make a lot of screw-ups. A couple of years ago, auditors gave a similar test to IRS tax preparers and found that 19 of the 23 returns they examined were wrong, and another set of testers who called the IRS help line to ask tax questions got correct answers only 62% of the time.