Where to find information on becoming a VITA Volunteer?

There are different ways to offer your services as a VITA volunteer. The IRS's main toll-free number 1-800-829-1040 offers help and may direct you to the right person. In many parts of the U.S., organizations at state, county or city programs recruit and train the volunteers, usually with the help and blessing of the IRS and the State Income Tax Authorities.

To avoid hunting for information on the telephone, one good way is to look for web sites using your favorite search engine. Doing so provides an abundance of riches.

Another alternative is to visit http://www.vita-volunteers.org. There is is possible to sign yourself up with a Yahoo!Group that periodically sends out announcements about when training starts so that you may be reminded when to officially register. Since the group is an announcement only group that only asks for an email address that you check periodically, there is little worry about being spammed by signing up for the group since it is managed by a respected well-known company. The site also has a custom search engine on the front page which draws on a smaller set of websites for its information, and provides a less abundant set of riches.

Who is this site for?

The original audience for the website was a small group of active VITA volunteers in Santa Clara County. Set up originally to act as an announcement page from the IRS VITA Coordinator, its scope expanded to taking online registrations of interested volunteers and site preferences, and emailing the information to the IRS VITA Coordinator.

Since there was a registration page, potential volunteers from all over the United States registered to get more information about the program, contact information, etc which was not available to the webmaster. So a separate page was set up for non-Santa Clara County volunteers, and enquiries forwarded to the IRS. Visitor traffic to the site increased, and the cities from which volunteers signed up is shown on the home page of the site.


The information turned out also to be relevant t0 visitors not interested in volunteering, but in using the services provided by the volunteers. Others had simple questions and requests for forms, all of which the webmaster could not answer individually, so the vita-information Yahoo!Group was set up as an announcement group to which people could subscribe.

On VITA and Volunteers

From the website http://www.vita-volunteers.org/ .....

"Volunteer Income Tax Assistance (VITA) volunteers provide FREE Income Tax Preparation Assistance to low-Income, elderly, disabled and limited English speaking people. Volunteers get FREE training and certification by the IRS"......

Training in Tax Law relevant to the clients who are served by VITA sites is provided in classrooms and online. There is abundant reference material provided that it is possible to self-study, but it is generally helpful in understanding and absorbing the material in the classroom because of the discussion and exchange of ideas. The end goal of the training is to pass an untimed open book exam based on the training material. The exam can be taken online through the web, or in the classroom where the test is included as part of training material. If a passing grade is not achieved the first time, there is the opportunity to take a retest. It is not clear how to get certified if a volunteer does not get the passing grade. However, with a little bit of thought and some resourcefulness, the determined volunteer can generally get certified quite easily even after not making it in two attempts.

Handling Tax Stimulus Returns in TaxWise

March 12, 2008

When the issue of TaxWise rejecting 2007 Income Tax Returns for the purpose of the Economic Stimulus Package came up, IRS Relationship Manager emailed all coodinators in Santa Clara County on Feb 19, 2008 that VITA HQ was studying the problem of what to do when Tax Wise returned an error for $0 AGI returns.


On Feb 27, 2008 an mail indicated that VITA HQ "has NOT endorsed the creation of phantom income ($1 interest income for instance) in order to force tax wise E-file. Paper filing is the recommended option." We were also advised to "Please do stay clear of advising the taxpayer on any kind of computation in terms of how much they will receive. Let the May 2008 notices take care of this.'


On Mar 3, 2008, the IRS sent out the following advisory "RP-2008-21 provides that the Internal Revenue Service will not challenge the accuracy of income tax returns filed in compliance with Notice 2008-28 by eligible individuals who enter $1.00 in adjusted gross income solely for purposes of effectuating the electronic filing of the return. This document will be published in IRB 2008-12, March 10, 2008"

In various reports in the media, and the IRS website, this appears to have been confirmed. It is allowed to do the $1.00 return without fear of the IRS rejecting the return if all other items are correct. It also appears to suggest that entering data into other boxes to meet qualifying income requirments may not meet the scrutiny that is otherwise in place.


So what to do? Guess it means that a place needs to be found to put in that $1 of bogus non-existent qualifying income to generate that $1 in AGI income. Should it be under wage income, unearned income, interest income or misc income?

Handling $0 AGI TaxWise rejects

When the issue of TaxWise rejecting 2007 Income Tax Returns for the purpose of the Economic Stimulus Package came up, IRS Relationship Manager emailed all coodinators in Santa Clara County on Feb 19, 2008 that VITA HQ was studying the problem of what to do when Tax Wise returned an error for $0 AGI returns.

On Feb 27, 2008 an mail indicated that VITA HQ "has NOT endorsed the creation of phantom income ($1 interest income for instance) in order to force tax wise E-file. Paper filing is the recommended option." We were also advised to "Please do stay clear of advising the taxpayer on any kind of computation in terms of how much they will receive. Let the May 2008 notices take care of this.'

On Mar 3, 2008, the IRS sent out the following advisory "RP-2008-21 provides that the Internal Revenue Service will not challenge the accuracy of income tax returns filed in compliance with Notice 2008-28 by eligible individuals who enter $1.00 in adjusted gross income solely for purposes of effectuating the electronic filing of the return. This document will be published in IRB 2008-12, March 10, 2008"

So what to do? Guess it means that a place needs to be found to put in that $1 of bogus non-existent taxable income to generate that $1 in AGI income. Should it be under wage income, unearned income, interest income or misc income?