Our favorite season is just around the corner: tax season. If you are confused about your taxes, there are free resources to help you. Check out your local Volunteer Income Tax Assistance (VITA) site. VITA consists of trained IRS certified volunteers who will file your taxes and answer any questions you may have, for free. All you need to do is bring all of your tax forms and information and show up.
There are certain cases where VITA cannot help you, such as if you made or lost money from farming or if you disposed of digital assets (crypto, NFTs). However, for most taxpayers, VITA will assist you.
Here is a link from the IRS website for more information. Not every area has a VITA site, but you can find out if your community has one from that link.
Been a VITA/AARP volunteer for 15 years. Great program, get your appointments early - my sites fill up early. Even though you might not have your tax documents you can still make your appointments for Feb, March or even April now.
@Whitney
Oh man appointments are such a great idea. I understand why our place is first come first served but it makes it kind of a mad house at the beginning and end of the season.
Mai said: @Whitney
Oh man appointments are such a great idea. I understand why our place is first come first served but it makes it kind of a mad house at the beginning and end of the season.
I’ve done both ways. Appointments are nice until someone with an appointment does not show up.
@Whitney
I ran a program for 6 years, and finding a balance was probably the hardest part of the program. We needed enough appointments to keep our volunteers busy, but we couldn’t do too many because sometimes we’d get behind and people got cranky. Some days it would be so bad we basically ran out of space for people to sit/stand around and wait for quality review. We couldn’t do too few appointments as volunteers would rightfully get annoyed if they were sitting around doing nothing plus we had goal numbers we had to hit.
March was probably the toughest because volunteers are slowing down on the hours they want to give, staff was getting tired from working 45-55 hours 6 days per week (and we’d all have at least one cold each by that point), appointments were more likely to no show as they booked their appointment in early February and either went elsewhere, did it themselves, or were able to sneak in an earlier appointment as we added appointments but didn’t tell us they had a March appointment, plus March appointments, we realized, generally took longer as they were more complicated returns.
Mai said: @Whitney
Oh man appointments are such a great idea. I understand why our place is first come first served but it makes it kind of a mad house at the beginning and end of the season.
We used to do first come first served. Then COVID. We switched to appointments with drop-off and return in 2 weeks. Almost all of the clients preferred that and it stuck.