CFPB FinEx Tax-Time Savings
September 24, 2015
1:00 pm CT


Welcome and thank you for standing by. All participants will be on listen-only mode until the question and answer session of today’s conference. At that time if you wish to ask a question you may do by pressing star-1. This conference is also being recorded. If you have any objections you may disconnect at this time. I would now turn the conference over to (Irene SKricki). Thank you and please begin.

Thank you. So welcome everybody to our (FINEX) webinar on tax time savings. I’m Irene Skricki with the Office of Financial Education here at the CFPB and I’m very pleased to welcome you. Today we will be talking about tax time savings and we have a guest from the Office of Financial Empowerment here at the Bureau.

Let me say a few background words before we start. First, I can get my clicker to work here, we always have a standard disclaimer. We’re not giving you legal guidance or regulatory guidance or financial advice. It’s our opinions.

And then quick word about the Bureau, many of you know this already I’m sure, but we help to keep financial - consumer financial markets working well by making rules more effective and enforcing rules and empowering consumers. And we do this through educating consumers, enforcing - and consumer protection rules.

And also studying - so gathering information about financial markets, about consumer behavior, and doing all that to try to make the markets work better. I am based in the Office of Financial Education, which is within the Consumer Education and Engagement Division.

We also have offices that look at special populations so just older Americans, military service members, and students, as well as our financial empowerment office who will be our speaker today and empowerment looks at economically vulnerable consumers. And we’re very happy to have Dave Sieminski here with us today.

Quick word about (FINEX), I always start off with this just to - I think most of you are already - have already joined but we encourage people to sign up for FINEX which is a CFPB Finance Education Exchange.

It’s our way of getting our tools and resources out to financial educators and others who are helping consumers and also learn back from all of you what you’re doing through surveys, through in person convening’s, other ways of hearing your opinions.

And so again, if you’re already signed up please encourage others to do so as well by emailing our inbox CFPB_FINEX@CFPB.gov.

We do monthly webinars as you know, we’re on one of them right now. Our next one is on student loan repayment coming up on October 22 at 2:00 Eastern. So you can register for that by emailing that same FINEX inbox. There will be more scheduled very soon for a month beyond October.

We also have a resource inventory that has a list of all the different tools and resources we have for financial educators. It’s on our FINEX webpage, which is ConsumerFinance.gov/Adult-Financial-Education - very catchy. But that is our URL and that is - has a number of things that will probably be of interest to you.

And as I always wind up saying, we also have a financial education discussion group on LinkedIn where you can post your own resources, questions, thoughts, and also see what the Bureau and others are putting up. So thank you for joining us and I think we are ready to turn to Dave Sieminski with the Office of Financial Empowerment.

Before Dave starts I’ll just note, we are going to hold voice questions you ask verbally until the end but we will give you a chance to do that. But if you have questions during the time when Dave is presenting there is a Q&A box at the top of your webinar - if you’re in the webinar itself that you can type a question in.

I will be monitoring that so if you have any clarifying questions or burning questions you can send that to me and I will ask it of Dave. And then at the end you’ll be able to ask questions verbally. And I know there’s always a few people who have trouble accessing the actual webinar system, system incompatibility.

So you can listen in on the audio. And again, this is being recorded so there will be a YouTube video where you can actually see all the slides later as well if you’re not able to get in today. So thank you for your patience in that regard. And I will now turn it over to Dave. Go ahead, Dave.

Dave Sieminski:	Thanks, (Irene), and thanks to everybody who joined us today and your interest in promoting saving at tax time. A little bit of background, the CFPB actually has a mandate in the Dodd-Frank Act that says we are obligated to encourage wealth building and financial services during the preparation process to claim the earned income tax credit and other federal benefits.

And even if we didn’t have that mandate we would likely be doing this work because we recognize - and as I’ll describe a little bit more detail later, the tax time is one of those unique moments in each year, especially for lower income consumers who may be getting refunds and especially those who might be getting the EITC to actually have a choice - have the opportunity to make the choice about whether to save or not.

And there’s a variety of ways that they can save relatively easily. So it’s a unique moment so it’s something that I think is worth really pursuing.

So I’m sure most people know this but just in case not the earned income tax credit is a benefit for working people who have low to moderate incomes. And a tax credit means more money in your pocket.

And effectively what it means is this is a refundable tax credit so if for example you are already due a refund because you’ve overpaid on your withholdings the EITC would be in addition to that refund that you got or if for example you owed taxes the EITC could actually be - if you’re eligible for the EITC, a portion of that could be used to - if you will pay down the amount that you owe. So it’s a refundable tax credit, that’s what makes it unique. And also it’s a benefit to a lot of lower income consumers.

So a little bit about what we’ve done so far and reminding everybody that we’re only four years old so we’ve been doing this for - sort of since we were born but in the first couple of years - looking at the couple of years that we have - for which we have the most recent data, this gives you an idea of sort of what the total lay of the land is in terms of tax preparation and tax filing.

So about 132 million personal returns are filed each year, that’s not including corporate returns, business returns.
Ninety-two million households that are filing returns have had an AGI less than 50,000, that’s just about 70% of all returns have an AGI less than 50,000. And approximately 27 million of those households, about a third receive the EITC. And the reason that there’s a significant difference is - well, the EITC eligibility is income based. It is also graduated and declines as your income increases.

So for example, a single person with no dependents would only have - get the earned income tax credit if made income less than about $14,000 whereas for example a family with three kids or more might get some portion of the EITC up to as much as, like, $53,000 or $54,000 in income a year. So it’s graduated and that’s why it’s - and there’s some eligibility reasons why, you know, not everybody who’s “low income” receives the EITC.

So how do people file their returns? Well, about 3.4 million households, about 2.6% file their returns through something called volunteer income tax assistance program, that’s basically most of you may be aware but in case not there are volunteer tax providers in many communities around the country. They are provided software and training by the IRS. And they literally in some cases recruit hundreds of volunteers to help people prepare their tax returns. And it’s all done for free.

But that’s a small portion of the market, primarily because a lot of consumers don’t know about VITA and also because there’s a lot of VITA campaigns around the country that just don’t have the capacity to serve more people.

So that means 71.4 million filers - about 53% - almost 54%, receive assistance from paid preparers, that means for example H&R Block, Jackson Hewitt, Liberty Tax, and a whole variety of smaller in person tax preparers around the country, many of which I’m sure you’re aware of in your communities.

Then about almost 59 million file by preparing their own returns and that - you know, that also could be on paper but in more and more cases that’s filing electronically using products like TurboTax or H&R Block’s product or a variety of other online products that make tax filing easier.

So how do people that receive refunds - how do they handle them? Well, about 85% of households with incomes less than 50,000 receive some sort of a refund. Some of those refunds are really large, others, you know, may just be a few dollars, but they receive some refund.

Sixty-three percent directly deposit their refunds into an account through the tax form and one of the things that’s really beneficial about this is even if you’re not saving - say you’re direct depositing all your money into your checking account, by direct depositing through the tax form you can get your refund much faster.

So if you’re direct depositing your refund and you get it in something like eight to 15 days, kind of depends on how busy the IRS is, if you are actually still asking for a paper check it’s going to take four to six weeks. So it’s a lot longer time you have to wait and so that’s why there’s a movement to increasing direct deposit.

About 1.5% of filers split their refund using the IRS form 8888 and have a portion deposited into some sort of savings account and the split refund option is actually started about six or seven years ago. I don’t remember the exact date. But anyway, what it does is it allows you - anybody to split their refund into up to three different buckets if you will.

So you can put some in your checking account, some in your savings account, you can buy a bond with another portion, or you can put it in a variety of other places that they allow you to do direct deposit but it’s a pretty convenient option and it allows for flexibility of where people put their refunds.

And then less than 1% of filers purchase a goverment savings bond and it’s interesting because savings bonds - when I was younger, you know, that used to be the thing everybody had was savings bond. Parents bought them for kids. And now they’ve become sort of an antiquated savings feature - a savings - way to save.

But they still are available. They’re available. You can sign up - you can actually sign up and make a direct deposit right through the tax form. And they actually pay pretty good interest especially compared to the interest rates of, you know - in regular savings accounts.

So the goals for tax time saving are - tax time saving promotion at CFPB are several. First is to offer consumers who have low incomes and low wealth more information and savings options. We want to make sure people know that they can save at tax time and how they can do it.

Second is to develop a deeper understanding of consumer decision making and service provider capability and so that’s really working - looking at both ends of the process because, you know, vast majority of people are - or majority of people are going someplace to get their taxes done and so we want to understand what the capacity is for those providers to be able to encourage and promote savings.

But we also want to make sure that we understand well what the consumer’s decision making process is when they’re thinking about their refund. And I’ll say a little bit more about that later but it’s an interesting, you know, circumstance about that one time a year when you actually file your taxes.

Third is to test the effectiveness of promising approaches in both the nonprofit and commercial environments. And I’ll say more about both of those environment later but we really want to know what it is that would sort of prompt people to think about saving as an option. And so you know, we’re continuously testing to see what works and what messages resonate.

Fourth is to quantify the consumer benefits to saving and again I’ll say a little bit more about this later but what we’re really interested in is we presume that if people save at tax time that there’s going to be some benefit that they’ll all be better off somehow.

But we really want to understand and document that better so we want to understand if people save at tax time, that that sort of reduces the risk that they may have to take out a high cost loan later in the year or use other funds or try to figure out another way to pay for some emergency - financial emergency that they didn’t anticipate like the car broke down or they missed a couple days of work or medical emergency.

So we want to engage with consumers after tax season to understand how that money was used and whether it benefited them.

And finally, we want to learn how and where the CFPB can productivity contribute to the consumer saving at tax time.

So why is saving at tax time important for people with low incomes? Well, first of all, if you think about it, it could be the single biggest check they receive all year. If you think of somebody making minimum wage their bimonthly paycheck is pretty small compared to, say, for example, a refund with - where they’re eligible for the earned income tax credit and they may be getting $3000 or $4000 back.

So it’s a unique moment when they have a lump sum that they may never have during the course of the year. For some people it feels a little bit like found money although in fact it's not really but it feels that way. And it gives them an opportunity to make a unique decision.

Also - and I referred to this a little bit earlier, building savings can insulate against economic shocks throughout the year. So if you have a little bit of money in savings then you can smooth out those unexpected expenses that may happen, you know, and it’s just - it’s something you need to deal with but having that money in savings is a lot easier to deal with than having to go it when you have nothing left.

And then saving while filing a return can be easy and automatic. There's several easy ways to do it, literally right through the direct deposit function of the return.

So what are the barriers to saving at tax time? Well, and this - (Irene) can attest to this I know and many others who have been involved in the tax preparation field and in, you know, the tax time savings world, is that most taxpayers when they walk in the door to get their taxes done if they’re going to get their taxes prepared at a preparer, have already mentally spent that refund. They know where it’s going.

They’re going to pay for the gifts they bought at Christmas. They’re going to pay the past due bills that they’ve been waiting to pay. They’re going to make some major purchase, maybe it’s furniture that they’ve just been - have needed to buy all year because their old stuff is wearing out but they just didn’t have the money for it.

Whatever it is they’ve sort of compartmentalized where that money’s going to go. And so talking to them about saving - especially when they’re just walking in the door and that’s a new option for them, sometimes it’s a little hard to sort of get that on the radar.

Tax volunteers or staff at tax sites don’t have a conversation about saving with taxpayers. In other words, they don’t get asked. You know, it from your income tax assistance site or even at paid preparer stores, they’re focused like a laser beam on making sure they get their tax return done, done quickly and accurately. And so having an additional conversation about savings options maybe something that’s not exactly on their radar.

Taxpayers don’t have their account information so even if a taxpayer wants to save they may not have their savings account information with them and so, you know, having the numbers to enter into the tax form is just not possible - at least in that moment.

Taxpayers don’t have any kind of account or savings vehicle. They may be unbanked. They don’t have a place to put money and that’s where offering options like the savings bond, you know, provides them an alternative and I’ll say more about that in a little bit.

And then there are at least some taxpayers that will worry that savings will affect their benefits eligibility. So you may be familiar with the fact that certain public benefits will have something called asset limits wherein you cannot have a - above a certain amount of savings that you hold and still be eligible for the benefit.

And while it’s true that actually tax refunds are exempt from the tax - from asset limits, most consumers don’t know that. So they assume that any time they put an additional amount of money in savings that they could be jeopardizing their eligibility.

So what we’ve done in the tax time savings space over the past couple of years, while 2014 and 15 we feel that saving options of different kinds involving over 75 community VITA campaigns. We provided trainings to over 250 trainers and actually that should say who have trained an additional several thousand volunteers. So we’ve got the word out about the promotion of savings to a lot of people.

We’ve developed and distributed consumer education materials on tax time savings to sites that’s serving over 200,000 consumers. We’ve visited with dozens of tax sites who observe savings campaigns. And I’ve personally have done a lot of those visits and it’s been really instructive to learn how what’s going on at the tax campaigns themselves at the tax sites.

And then we’ve conducted additional interviews and conversations with additional - with more volunteer site managers and organizational staff to learn what’s working, what’s not working in that space.

So also what we did in 2015 - and I mentioned - may have mentioned this briefly, but we developed in 2015 - this was the first year of a multiyear collaboration with H&R Block to promote saving and to test approaches at scale. As I had mentioned, you know, more than half of people go get their taxes done at a paid preparer.

Block has just about half of that or a little less than half of that customer base. They are the largest in the field. And one of the things that, you know, we - you know, we were really interested in is since so many people with lower incomes are going to paid preparer to get their taxes done we couldn’t - we wanted to make sure that those customers were also getting the word about the benefits of savings in addition to the customers who are only just - who were just going to VITA campaigns.

And also because Block was willing we’re able to test at a significant scale certain types of approaches to encouraging savings, which I’ll talk about in a minute. But you know, it gives us an opportunity to, you know, sort of really test at a high level scale and we’re able to do random control trial studies using the samples that - at Block customers.

And the three treatment areas, the three areas we’re testing at a randomized basis are marketing so getting the word out in advance of tax season to marketing through email campaigns and things like that to inform people about savings; changing the script at the tax desk so that Block tax pros are actually having a conversation about saving with their customers, which wasn’t necessarily happening previously - at least not consistently so; and then gamification which is this sort of broad concept about sort of making savings fun, creating some excitement or incentives to save.

Some of the results we’ve observed in 2014 and 15 - and this is primarily through a nonprofit work through the VITA work is we had over 200,000 taxpayers that had their returns prepared at the site using our materials and training.

Seventy-five percent of those taxpayers did receive refunds, 2.7% split their refunds and put a portion into some savings vehicle, and about 2% about US saving bonds. And while those last two numbers seem pretty small, in fact they’re almost double what the national average is because saving rates are pretty low just generally and they have been low.

So while we don’t claim necessarily any sort of, like, significant impact on that, you know, we can’t say that because of our efforts that saving rate went up by - it does - it’s informative to see that those numbers can nudge up and especially when we look inside the data and look at individual tax campaigns and what they were doing, certain ones were much more successful than others.

So we learned as much from the sort of qualitative information we’ve gotten from these conversations as we have from the data that we got regarding the actual numbers of people that save.

So as I said, you know, the learnings that we got from those conversations and from hearing from those various tax campaigns and even from talking to our friends at H&R Block were several. And what we’ve done is we’ve identified ten promising practices that we think are - that could be beneficial in helping people save when they - for example, go get their taxes done at a VITA store or a tax store.

And the approaches are primarily focused on the preparers of taxes. So one of the things we recommend is communicate with consumers about saving before they come to the tax site. That speaks directly to that issue that I identified earlier about people having pre-spent - already mentally spent their refund.

If they put saving as an option into that queue - mental queue along with their other options then they’re - we think more likely to actually save when they get to make that decision at the tax store.

Second is offer the saving option more than once at the tax site or the tax store. So if you offer an option offer something to a person who’s never thought about it before and you only say it once, it’s likely that that might get their attention but not necessarily sink in.

So we think it’s a recommended practice to make sure if you’re trying to promote savings that you, you know, let people know maybe when they come in that savings is an option, engage with them at other times if you can through the conversation, you know, with them as you’re preparing taxes.

And certainly maybe make another ask after they find out how much refund they’re getting when they can really make a decision.

Third is make sure tax preparers know how to help consumers save while filing. One of the things we’ve found out is that there is at last some - especially volunteer tax preparers that we talked with who sort of didn’t know the mechanics of helping people to save in the software that they were using.

And so somebody might say, I’d love to save and then they go, well, I don’t know how to do that. And I’m really busy and I have another customer coming in. And so that could be off-putting. What we want to do is make sure that the plumbing is all in place so that if somebody says they want to save then it becomes easy and automatic.

Dedicate staff or volunteers for promoting savings. One of the other things we learned from talking to a lot of tax preparers is that it - there’s a lot of staff for volunteers that are there exclusively to prepare tax returns and that’s what they focus on and that’s a really important thing to focus on, making sure they get it done right, get it done fast, and make sure they help the next customer.

So having a little bit of excess capacity, you know, part time of a staff person or a volunteer who’s exclusive responsibility is promoting saving, that allows that person to float and be able to have conversations with people either before they get their taxes done or even during the time they’re having their taxes done and take the burden off of the tax preparer.

And then using anchoring and prompts to consumers focus on savings and I’ll say this is something we’ve learned and is really effective from another body of research that’s going on done by Washington University of St. Louis working with Intuit who have used the anchoring approach, the idea of suggesting an amount or percentage of the return that they make it easier to save.

So would you think about saving 10% or 25% of your refund if you get it? So planting that seed through anchoring is a way to sort of get people to think about, you know, actually making a decision.

So a few more promising practices, make sure all staff and volunteers are committed to encouraging saving. Everybody’s got to be on the same team.

If you decide that saving - promoting saving at tax time is what you want to do as an organization or as a tax site then it’s got to work well so if you have a dedicated savings specialist talking to people about saving they need to hand that person off to the person who’s going to actually help them follow through.

And if everybody’s not sort of understanding what the process is and is equally enthusiastic and encouraging then, you know, that - it may fall flat - the message may fall flat.

Don’t - the next is don’t overwhelm consumers with too many different types of options. We’ve seen a number of times, especially with a lot of nonprofits run these VITA campaigns and they’re multi-service providers that offer a whole bunch of different services.

And they want to make sure that the consumer knows about all of their services because they have them - this may be the first time they’ve ever met them or seen them. And you know, those consumers may very well be able to benefit from the other services they provide.

But what we’ve learned - and this is not exclusive to tax preparation but, you know, if you offer people too many options and different things, especially things they’ve never heard about or learned about before they may tend to shut down and they may choose none as the alternative.

And so if you’re thinking about encouraging saving as a priority then you want to feature that and even if you’re thinking about encouraging some other activity you want to be able to feature that and make sure that you’re not overwhelming people with too many choices that they may not be ready to make.

Providing incentives to encouraging saving, we’ve seen several campaigns around the country who have done different things. There’s a national sweepstakes around tax time saving offered by an organization called No Wasted Dreams called Save Your Refund and it’s really easy.

You can - if you save a portion of your refund you can sign up for this sweepstakes and then your name gets drawn out. They have monthly or weekly drawings and then a grand prize at the end of the tax season but that’s exciting for consumers who - you know, just the possibility of being able to win some additional money sort of gets the juices flowing and they’re excited about that.

And they don’t lose anything if they don’t win, you know, their savings is still there but it’s an opportunity that sometimes gets their attention. Also we’ve seen other campaigns that have done things like offer small dollar prepaid cards or gift cards or something like that.

And when consumers - sometimes it just gets them to - nudges them to consider saving and when they do save they tend to save more than you might expect once they make the decision to save. So there’s various ways to offer incentives.

Provide multiple options for saving, now I mentioned that some people don’t even have an account or they may not have their information so making sure that people know that they could save into a savings bond or in this year this will be the first tax season where there will actually be a new retirement account that they can save into that’s called the My RA.

So making sure the consumers are aware, they do have options to save even if they don’t have a savings account or don’t have the information readily available.

And then finally, making savings fun and that means, you know, offering sweepstake is an option or even making it fun to the people in the - that are the staff or volunteers so that they know, you know, sometimes you can get some excitement flowing. When somebody saves you can, you know, bump up the old thermometer or ring the bell or do something like that that sort of celebrates that additional accomplishment.

So what we’re planning for 2016 in the nonprofit sector? We’re doing a larger scale pilot with approximately 25 communities. We’re literally in the process of, you know, looking for proposals or letters of interest on that right now and I’ll say more right at the end about that.

We’re going to enhance our training using promising practices to encourage saving for tax preparers. And then we’re going to expand our offering of education and promotional materials for the tax prep marketplace.

We’re also going to be working with Block for a second year to continue our collaboration, expand its scale in all three of those treatment areas I talked about. We’ll do follow up surveys of savers from Year 1 so that we can start learning about what the benefits of saving were. And then we’ll do a report probably sometime early 2016 on the results of Year 1.

These are a few of the other products that we have so we just recently released a report called increased saving at tax time promising practices of the field. That - basically that report talks a lot about some of the things that I’ve talked about in this webinar and also has some more details on those promising practices. And you can download that at our - on our website.

We also will be offering - and available to everybody but also for use with the folks in our pilot a variety of information materials around saving at tax time, different way to make the most of your tax refund.

The sheet on your right, I know you can’t read it, but basically has a little checklist and one of the options like under Number 2 is, you know, would you like to save a certain percentage of your refund? So we’re trying to use those ideas that I’ve talked about to suggest ways that people could save and perhaps even an amount that they might want to save.

The piece on the right is actually a trifold desktop item that you can - when you glue it together basically you could set it on top of the desks so if you were a tax preparer and you’re doing somebody’s taxes and the consumer’s sitting there sort of for 30 minutes or so while you’re doing all your work.

And so having something like that on the desk that talks about ways to save might catch their attention so it’s a nice sort of attention getter.

Finally - and I referred to the pilot that we’re doing for this coming tax season and if you’re interested and we are still accepting letters of interest until September 28 which I believe is next Monday and you can send those letters of interest if you are a VITA campaign and you’re interested in promoting saving. You can send those letters of interest to Empowerment@ConsumerFinance.gov.

And then finally, if you want to download that tax time savings paper that I just showed you a picture of you can go to our website which is - our webpage which is ConsumerFinance.gov/Empowerment.

And so that’s it. (Irene)?

Sorry, Dave. I’m here. I’m muting myself. I couldn’t find the mute button for a minute. Great, thank you very much. So I’ve been monitoring - we haven’t had any emailed questions in but, Operator, I think we are ready for voice questions. So if you want to give instructions for that that would be great.

Thank you. At this time if you wish to ask a question please ensure your phone is unmuted. Press star-1 and record your name when prompted. Again, that is star-1 to ask a question over the phone lines. And those questions will take one moment to queue up. Please stand by.

And while we’re waiting, Dave, this was terrific, for people who are not directly doing tax time - who aren’t themselves for example doing tax preparation or running a VITA site, how might you suggest the general financial educators working with clients in other settings might use some of these ideas in their practice?

Well, I mean I think some of the ideas are basic and they don’t necessarily have to be only used by tax preparation providers. So for example, the idea of suggesting saving a tax time as an option, you know, for financial educators that are working with clients in July or October or whenever, you know, offering that as an option and talking about the benefits of saving and ways - easy ways that you can save while filing a return is a good way to sort of prompt them to consider and then they have questions that you can answer.

So I think that’s one way to do it. You know, you’re welcome - it doesn’t matter, you don’t have to be a tax campaign to download any of our informational materials that we have on our website, some of which are just sort of generic information about ways to save that could be used and handed out, you know, at any time and used as a conversation started.

So those are a couple ways that I think anybody can - you know, sort of encourage people to save or at least inform them about the saving options at any time of year.

Great. And I just want to note in terms of the resources that Dave talked about today, I had mentioned earlier and some of you are familiar with the resource inventory that’s on the Financial Education page that lists things across the Bureau, these tax time resources are brand new.

I am actually updating that resource directory not - more or less as we speak this week so they will appear shortly. So they’re not in there right now but you can get them on the empowerment page of our website as Dave had mentioned. But they will be added to that inventory very shortly.

Operator, do we have any voice questions?

I’m showing we currently have no questions.

Great, okay. Dave, can you tell us - I’ll just as a couple more questions to give people time if they do have any questions that they want to phone in. Talk a little bit more about what the pilot would entail if groups wanted to participate in that?

Sure, what we’re looking for is primarily - is VITA campaigns so voluntary income tax assistance campaigns and as I said previously for folks that may not be familiar, a lot of these campaigns are operated by nonprofit organizations, United Ways, sometimes they’re actually even offered by - like, for example, a credit union or something like that although most of them are operated by nonprofits.

And there’s likely one or more in your - in many communities because they are all over the country. And so if you are either part of a VITA campaign, part of a collaborative that’s balancing a VITA campaign or know an organization in your community that is one you can send us a letter of interest and basically what we’re asking is just to give us some basic information, you know.

Are you - talk a little bit about your work in doing VITA, in preparing taxes, your interest in promoting saving as an option, maybe a little bit about your capacity to encourage saving and then just anything else you can tell us. And we’re not asking for a lot of information in that letter of interest so it doesn’t need to be a grand proposal of ten pages.

It can be, you know, a page or two pages that just gives us an idea of - and make sure obviously that - you know, include your contact information and other critical information so that we can - we know who you are, we know your interest, and a little bit about your local campaign.

So I would encourage you even if you’re not a VITA provider yourself, if you know a campaign in your community that you think might be interested in engaging, that you let them know about this opportunity and they can get in touch at the link that I showed in the presentation.

Great, and Dave, I actually popped the slide back up to that so that’s green right now - sending letters to Empowerment@ConsumerFinance.gov. And then what would the - and just to reiterate what you kind of said in passing earlier, what would the pilot - pilot sites actually be...

Okay, what would they do? What would they have to do?

Well, yes, what does it mean to be a participant in this?

Yes, so what we’re - plan on, and certainly the is we want to make this as low impact as we can because we understand that if folks are getting ready for tax season right now or in the next couple of months, you know, that period of time is really busy.

They’re trying to train their volunteers, they’re trying to - and then of course when the tax season they’re going to be really busy doing tax returns.

But what we would ask folks to do is respond to an early survey once we - you know, if they’re chosen to participate to just sort of give us a lot of logistical information about, you know, when they offer their trainings, how they offered it, how many volunteers they have, some things like that that would be helpful to us in preparing for the training we’ll provide.

Then we’ll also - we’ll be offering - we’ll let them know about all the materials and information that we have, the printed materials and other things, and also some materials for web based promotion and make sure that we have that in their hands and in sufficient quantities so they can offer it to their customers.

We’ll ask them to participate in the - in a webinar-based training that we’ll offer. We’ll offer several of them in December and early January. We understand that we’re probably not going to be able to do it live for everybody because if we have 25 sites that people offer training at different times.

But we’ll record one of the trainings and make it available so that you can incorporate it into your training. We’ll ask a project lead to be - to participate in probably one monthly quick check-in call during the course of tax season, January, February, March. And then we’ll be available for technical assistance fi they have questions throughout the tax season.

And then finally we’ll ask the participants to give us a yearend report which will - you know, a small number of data points, number of people who they serve, number of people that saved and a variety - a few other details.

And then a short narrative report that sort of tell us about what worked, what didn’t, what was effective so it helps to add to our knowledge base about how to promote saving.

Great, thank you very much. And so actually I would just add something which probably you have all realized which is that there’s a lot of information and kind of public messaging around tax time - when tax time is close. You know, so December and certainly January.

One reason why we’re doing this webinar and why Dave is getting these materials out now is before for people planning to do tax prep there’s a much longer lead time to get all that up and running.

And I would say even for those of you who don’t directly do tax preparation I think it’s good to start thinking now about how you can start talking to your customers and clients about, you know, planning ahead for tax time, thinking about savings, start to plant the ideas - the idea in people’s heads now so that when January comes around they’re perhaps more likely to see the opportunity when it presents itself at tax time.

Let’s see, quick check, Operator, are there any questions now?

We still have no questions.

Great. Well, I think we are undoubtedly, Dave, it’s because you were very clear. And actually this is really interesting and a real opportunity and, again, even for those folks who don’t have - who aren’t doing this directly, looking for VITA campaigns or other ways to think about partnering around tax time in your own community is a terrific idea.

And both using these materials yourself as well as letting others, again, who may be directly engaged with tax time, we really encourage you to do that.

So unless there are any final questions we will end a few minutes early and give people ten minutes back. Wait a minute, there’s one - sorry, there’s one email question. Let me just read this to you, Dave.

Our agency provides tax time education in the community in English and Spanish. What are best practices for this communication? How early are nonprofit providers doing this? So I guess tax time education generally - best practices and early. So just addressing that issue of timing.

So early - you know, especially if you’re financial educators and you’re engaging with consumers throughout the tax year then any time is good but especially now as we’re in the last couple months before tax season is a really good time to sort of either plant the seed or replant the seed about the opportunities to save.

You know, I think because people only file their tax returns once a year they - you know, once they get past it they don’t think about it again until it starts to be getting closer to tax season. So for consumers you want to engage them early but not, you know - probably not so early that they kind of forget it.

For tax assistance providers, a lot of VITA campaigns are starting to gear up now - some of them have already geared up. They’re already starting to recruit volunteers. Some of them probably will start their training in November and certainly there will be a heavy amount of training in December and early January.

So what we’re going to try to do is we’re going to try to have all our materials and training ready before December 1 so that we’re catching that - the - pretty much the early wave of tax campaigns and their respective volunteers as they’re starting to do their training and having all our materials in our training available. So that’s kind of the arc of preparation for tax season.

Great, and actually I’ll just follow up on that, Dave, because the question is also talking about general best practices on communicating around tax time. I know that the whole tax field has done years of work on sort of thinking about different ways to reach people through radio and fliers and billboards and reaching out to their nonprofits of groups that could potentially be referrals or public agencies for that matter. Do you want to add anything to that list of...

Yes, and I think - I mean all that is true and of course it’s as you probably know if you watch TV or listen to the radio that it gets to be around December you start to see ads for professional tax preparers and, you know, that’s - I mean they obviously have a big megaphone.

And so you really have to be pretty diligent to, you know, take advantage of whatever resources you are in your community, whether it’s the word of mouth or whether it’s, you know, local TV if you can afford that kind of thing.

Maybe you can get contributions from TV and radio, from print messaging. All of those ways that people might normally get information if you can get - you know, in front of them with the primary service, which is getting their taxes done for free.

And then of course, if you can also embed a savings message in there too that’s great. But yes, you need to take advantage of, you know - let’s face it, the tax field doesn’t have tons of money to spend on big blast TV campaigns but there’s a variety of ways that - and a lot of tools out there, resources to help local campaigns do relatively economically messaging to people who might benefit from the service.

Right, and just to note, again, thinking the question - if you’re not actually running a VITA campaign yourself clearly finding somewhere you can refer your own clients if you’re just talking to them about the value of tax time savings is making sure you give someone somewhere to go to act on that.

I will note just from the early days of this field, all of maybe, what, ten or 15 years ago, a lot of people did EITC outreach so letting people know who might be eligible for the EITC.

And I think one of the early lessons from that work was that people - you know, let people know about the EITC, it’s just amazing benefit for working families, but to actually claim it you have to, you know, know how to do your taxes and actually claim it so people were going to paid preparers and ending up spending a portion of that refund to actually get the taxes done. And in some ways that’s where the VITA or free tax prep field came from.

So if you’re doing general kind of tax education or financial education the more concrete you can be about giving someone somewhere you can actually go to get your taxes done in a way that will, you know, minimize cost and maximize sort of accuracy and obviously getting all the benefits you’re eligible for, that is a real benefit.

And there are probably free tax prep programs certainly in almost every metropolitan area. And there may be some other online type options for folks in more rural areas, not sure where that stands but those are some ideas for - you know, again, the more concrete you can make it for folks. Does that...

(Irene), I would add that while it’s updated every year the IRS does have a - you can go to IRS and you can type in VITA and it has a search tool that you can search by zip code and it will give you a list of the - you know, sort of five closest VITA sites and while that - some of those sites change from year to year will give you at least a notion of what’s going on in your community and where the closest VITA sites may be.

And then, you know, what you may want to do is - especially if it’s early like into November, you’re thinking about this, contact the organization that runs that VITA campaign and see how you can help.

Great, actually one more question from the same person, sort of a very logical follow up. Are the CFPB materials on tax time in Spanish?

Yes, they will be. A portion of them were in Spanish last year, all of them will be in Spanish this year.

Great. And when do those become available?

We’re - our goal is to have them all available by - the updated ones by December 1.

Great, in English and Spanish.

Yes.

Excellent, great, thank you. All right, I don’t have any other questions via email. Operator, one last query, any other phone questions?

I’m showing we have no phone questions.

Great, well, we’re just about coming up on - we’re getting very close to 3 o’clock so I guess we will finish up now. So thank you very much, Dave, really appreciate it. This is some really useful information, I think people can act on this or share with others in their community who can.

And again, thanks everyone for being part of FINEX. We’ll continue to have webinars and other events coming up - you’ll get them all through the FINEX newsletter and if you’re not signed up, again, email CFPB_FINEX@CFPB.gov.

So thank you everyone, we appreciate your participating. And you are finished.

Thank you.

And with that we will conclude today’s conference. Again, thank you for your participation and you may disconnect your lines at this time.


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