WHY VITA (Volunteer Income Tax Assistance)

Volunteer Income Tax Assistance (VITA) is a great tax preparation service provided to lower income families. The IRS set up this service as a way to provide free tax work for those who generally could not afford to have their taxes prepared professionally. I've evenofferd this service at the Muncie Ivy-Tech location for the past 3 years.

The IRS expenses to run this service includes sending out all the training materials (which consists of a large text book plus other booklets), any forms each site may need, contracting out a professional tax software company to provide the software as well as many other costs. One would think if the IRS put this much money into a free service, they would expect quite a windfall of taxes to come in. However, just the opposite generally happens. During the first day we were open, estimated the refunds of those to be about $20,000 in total. Why do you think the IRS goes to the trouble to provide this free service when most lower income individuals receive a refund?