Happy Tax Day! (Words I never thought I’d tweet ) This year’s tax day feels special because of all the work we’ve been doing with http://GetYourRefund.org  (a thread)

I joined the team in November, there were a total of 4 of us working on this pilot project. At that point, I honestly didn’t know much about the Earned Income Tax Credit or the IRS VITA program https://www.irs.gov/individuals/free-tax-return-preparation-for-you-by-volunteers (The IRS has a program that provides free tax prep services?!)

Yes, that’s right FREE. There are millions of Americans who qualify for free tax assistance, but get tricked into paying for TurboTax, H&R block, or other for profit tax prep services.
More on that from @propublica @hasanminhaj https://www.propublica.org/article/inside-turbotax-20-year-fight-to-stop-americans-from-filing-their-taxes-for-free

Back to VITA, they had a mostly in person model. So in January, we built out a location search for VITA sites. https://www.getyourrefund.org/en/vita_providers

By February we launched the MVP of http://GetYourRefund.org  and had our first client go through the process! They were skeptical at first, but delighted when they received a nice refund

Between February and March, we collaborated with our 4 pilot partners in CA, CO, AZ, GA. We worked on improvements to identity verification. Our team slowly grew.

and then COVID hit.

VITA sites across the country had to close and couldn’t offer in person service. So we rolled up our sleeves and started to scale our pilot.

We worked with amazing @codeforamerica brigades from across the country, hired more folks on our team, and we went from 4 partners to 46+. We scaled to serve all states across the US.

As of today we’ve helped deliver $25M+ in returns and we’re still going!

If you know folks who earned less than $66k and don’t owe this year, they can still file for 2019 (and 2018, 2017) for free with http://GetYourRefund.org 

Our tax specialists know all about tax credits and will maximize your return