Tax season

Tax season is here and the question for some Utah State University students is how to file tax returns for much-needed money from the past year. To help students with this yearly ritual, there are a number of options available, including one-on-one help or websites to help with filing taxes.

The Volunteer Income Tax Assistance (VITA), an organization in the Jon M. Huntsman School of Business, is a program in which the IRS partners with people willing to serve others to help get taxes done. There are VITA sites all over the nation, some going through government agencies, others going through universities, said Bonnie Villarreal, director of the accounting graduate programs and a tax professional who helps run VITA each year.

“One of the cool things about having a VITA site at a university is that it’s a win-win; students that are attending the university get the help with situations that are unique to the fact that they are attending university,” said Villarreal. “But also the volunteers, who are often studying things like income tax, get real-world experience to kind of supplement the classroom experience.”

Volunteers sit down with students and walk them through the process. This year, however, VITA is starting a fast-track program, where students can drop off copies of those documents needed to file and can come back to pick up the finished return any time later in the tax season. Villarreal said this will cut back on waiting lines so more people can be served.

Kourtney Harding, a graduate student in soil science, uses VITA with her husband to file taxes every year.

“Yeah, there’s some waiting, but we always knew that going in,” Harding said. “So we just go hang out and do homework while we wait. And I like that they’re getting practice, and once we got in there, we just had all our stuff and they just put it all in. They knew to ask about how much I spent on textbooks and tuition and when we paid tuition and things like that.”

To take advantage of the the service VITA offers, students can go in on any of the designated days during tax season to get one-on-one help.

VITA isn’t just for students. Community members in need of assistance can take advantage of the service on campus. Every January, those who want to volunteer are trained in both professionalism and competency in tax returns, said Villarreal. They are also trained to help international students who may not be familiar with U.S. tax laws.

In the last couple of years VITA at USU generated $850,000 in tax returns and refunds, said Villarreal. Every year about 50 volunteers help with the VITA program.

“Every year we do this tax training, and usually we do it on a Saturday morning, and it’s January, and it’s like zero degrees. … I come up here, and I think, ‘No one is going to show up. Why would you get up at 8 o’clock on a Saturday morning to do something you don’t have to do?'” said Villarreal. “And a hundred kids will walk in the door because they care about trying on the profession they care about, helping people, … and it almost brings tears to my eyes every year that we get all these people who come out and want to help.”

VITA is sponsored at USU by Beta Alpha Psi, the International Accounting Honors Association. Many students who end up volunteering with VITA come from Beta Alpha Si, said Villarreal, who is also faculty advisor for the organization.

Though filing through an organization or a program like VITA is the way some students do tax returns, personally filing is another option and the preference of people like recent graduate Steve Mortenson.

“The reason why I started doing it myself was because I like the real-world experience,” said Mortenson, who now works for a consulting firm in Washington D.C. “By doing it myself I was able to see how taxes work. … I felt like I was in control of my return, and I could try different things, like if I paid for school myself, I was able to get that tax break.”

Mortenson, who graduated with a duel-major in marketing and business administration, uses freetaxusa.com.

“I think doing your own taxes is the best learning experience,” Mortenson said. “It’s pretty easy if you just take the time to do it. It helps us prepare for when we have real-life things, like a mortgage. … We’ll know how that affects us, and how to make educated decisions.”

For information about VITA or questions about filing taxes, visit huntsman.usu.edu/bap/htm/vita/usu.

—mandy.m.morgan@aggiemail.usu.edu