Volunteers to help students, city residents file their taxes

The start of a new semester can be demanding, but when combined with tax season, it can create Rosetta Stone Languages difficulties for students and families. Beta Alpha Psi, an academic fraternity open to accounting and finance majors, is offering to do your taxes for free.Volunteer Income Tax Assistance is a program sponsored by the Internal Revenue Service and implemented by Beta Alpha Psi and the Emanuel Community Development Corporation. The program is opening a site at the Rutgers Student Center on the College Avenue campus from Feb. 6 to April 3, said Beta Alpha Psi President Ryan McDonough, a Rutgers Business School senior. Students can meet with members of the fraternity by appointment from 1 to 4 p.m. on Fridays in the student center atrium, McDonough said."VITA is something we've always done, I've always pushed to have a site on campus, so this year we're going to be doing it at the student center," McDonough said. "We have people to more than cover the community, we want as many people to know about it as possible." VITA is a national program providing free assistance to low-income, elderly, limited-English proficient and disabled individuals who require assistance in preparing their tax returns and cannot afford the services of a paid professional tax preparer, according to a press release.All 110 members of Beta Alpha Psi are required to participate and train for 10 hours to receive basic certification in order help students and families who have an income of less than $39,000 a year fill out their tax returns, McDonough said. "I make sure that everyone in Beta Alpha Psi knows that they have to train; [fraternity members] do it because they want to be accountants and they haven't had much client experience," said the fraternity's Community Service Advisor Bassem Wadie, a Livingston College senior accounting major.The IRS distributes packets and training programs, which William Johnson, the program coordinator for the Emanuel Community Development Corporation, uses to train VITA members to attain their certification. "This is our fourth year, our second with Beta Alpha Psi," he said. "We want to double our production from last year, and that would be at least 1,200 returns Rosetta Stone V3 completed and $1 million in tax refunds to the community."McDonough said he wanted to involve Beta Alpha Psi in more community projects. "We do financial accounting tutoring for Introduction to Accounting courses at the Livingston Learning Center, but that's to a select number of people," he said. "We're also helping [the Emanuel Community Development Corporation] to achieve their goals, that's another reason we wanted to do this Rutgers site."McDonough said it was a logical service since students love free stuff, plus they will get money back. School of Arts and Sciences sophomore Konstantin Tavadze echoed this sentiment. "I think it'd be awesome [to have taxes done] for free," Tavadze said.Wadie said the fraternity's members are not doing complicated returns. "A lot of people don't know how much money they can get back and they're just happy that we found money for them," he said.McDonough said the average tax return takes an estimated 30 minutes."We'll be doing about four or five tax returns an hour, hopefully," he said.Beta Alpha Psi's advisor Marjorie Yuschak, a professor at the Business School, said last year's program was a big breakthrough because everything became computerized. "Because everything was done manually [in previous years], it took longer and is really not as accurate," Yuschak said. "Now we can take advantage of the computer database which gives us the ability to process so many more returns."McDonough said the typical appointment will begin with a fraternity member first interviewing a student or client to make sure they have all of their documents. The client will then sit with one of the fraternity volunteers to go through the actual tax return, plug the numbers into a computer program and finally do a quality review, which is mandated by the IRS, before they e-file the return. "The IRS knows that we are volunteer tax preparers, Rosetta Stone English so the IRS then reviews [the tax return] and if they reject it, we just fix the problem," McDonough said. "When the IRS accepts it you know its just as good as paying for your taxes to be done."School of Arts and Sciences first-year student Michael Bruno, a business major, said he has done his own taxes before. "I don't think it's so bad, but I think it's [a good program] if you don't know how to do your tax return," he said. "It's cool to teach people, so they can do it in the future."Wadie said they often help families and students find credits they could have missed out on without the help of someone experienced with tax law. "There's something called the Earned Income [Tax] Credit; it's estimated that millions of families miss this credit and to have a service like this, it helps them to be able to catch that," he said. "A non-English speaking family would potentially miss a lot of credits that would potentially help them."McDonough said they can also print their tax returns in Spanish this year. Beta Alpha Psi has been a part of the University community for more than 10 years. The office is located in the Janice H. Levin Building on Livingston campus, and membership in the fraternity is open to finance and accounting majors, but any interested party can volunteer to help with VITA.Beta Alpha Psi will also be providing the service on Saturdays from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m at the New Brunswick Public Library on Livingston Avenue. There will be five Rosetta Stone Languages VITA sites set up throughout New Brunswick, Johnson said.Students interested in making an appointment to meet with a fraternity member at the Rutgers Student Center on the College Avenue.