Public Service Tax Program Lets You Do Good and Make Good

Here's the deal: You get to give back to your community, you get to practice interviewing real clients with real concerns, you get to learn enough about the tax code to do your own tax return without having to take a tax class-and, in exchange, you pay nothing. "Whoa," you say, "Sign me up!" Can do.

Permit us to introduce VITA, the Law Student Division's Volunteer Income Tax Assistance program. As a law student, you may be getting ready for winter break, but everyone else out there in the real world is getting ready to fill out their tax returns, which the Internal Revenue Service mails out with the new year. Over the next couple of months, the division's VITA program will put thousands of law students to work helping low-income taxpayers prepare their tax returns.

The VITA program was created by the IRS in the 1960s. In 1977 the Low-Income Taxpayers' Committee of the American Bar Association's Section of Taxation came up with funding to encourage and maintain law student participation in the program. Today, the program is staffed primarily by law students and administered by a law student national director: Angela Boeck, a second-year student at Washburn University School of Law in Topeka, Kansas. It's her job to help law schools with their VITA sites.

To do that, Boeck attended most of the ABA/LSD circuit meetings this fall to brief law students on the program. In addition, by now your ABA/LSD school representative and/or lieutenant governor for VITA should have received a VITA handbook, which includes a calendar of events to help you plan your school's site.

Boeck says the goal of this year's VITA program is to serve "our communities, not only with our time, but with more detailed training programs. If our volunteers are not properly trained, then we are doing a disservice to the very people we are trying to help." She encourages local VITA leaders to plan their training sessions early and to try to enlist the aid of tax law professors. The IRS sometimes can provide free basic tax training to VITA volunteers, but this needs to be scheduled as soon as possible. If your school does not participate in VITA, it's not too late for you to plan a site. But speak with Boeck as soon as possible to help expedite the process. You can contact her at 800/FON-VITA or at angela_boeck@juno.com.

Angela Boeck and Lee Farbman