We are an oddball in this group. We came to tax prep from a different place. We used to work for the United Farmworkers, and we are not able to get foundation funding. United Farmworkers has a big image, but a limited budget -- we had to do everything for free. We did free taxes for folks in our neighborhood, but our customers finally convinced us to do tax refund loans. We had to charge them for this service, and they are very comfortable with that because they need the money and they trust us. We do direct deposit for the few people who have and use a bank account. We do quite a bit of tax prep for immigrants. We offer refund transfers for people without bank accounts, but the fee is a little bit larger. We did about 30 RALs for our customers in cases of emergencies.

We do not use volunteers because we do not have the resources to bring in and train people. We use our own staff.

We want to provide a good service to our members at a better price than the chop shops down the street. The large companies are not the bad apples. There are smaller shops that will really take advantage of people -- there are a couple of hundred of these organizations in our neighborhood alone. Many times we fix things for customers who have been ripped off by these other organizations.

Our other goal is to keep our doors open. We're open year-round, and this is important for our customers. We are building a movement in our community, and the service is one component of that movement.

What have we learned? Life is tough. Building market share takes a lot of hard work. We've been doing tax prep for ten years and we're still not the major player in our community. We put 10,000 flyers on the street in January and a little bit of radio advertising. We only got a couple of dozen of customers that way. People who know and trust us come back year after year.

What we need is a significant investment. We can do a lot more business, and others can do this too. More non-profits should be doing low-cost tax prep. We should develop a national brand with local franchises. More banks should also do rapid tax refunds -- there are only a few banks doing this.

The panel this morning made a lot of great points. FoodChange started with food stamps, and I have just moved into the tax prep side of the business. We staff through volunteers (192), paid preparers (202) and paid checkers. We get volunteers from law and accounting students, people from firms like CSFB, and general volunteers. We have four groups of paid preparers. For each five preparers, we have a checker. Each return is checked six or seven times.

We started in 2002 with 2,000 returns. In the second year, we grew to 10,000 returns. We offer five classes per day - Word, Excel, Quickbooks and TaxPrep in 11 weeks. We can then hire these people at just below the living wage. Hiring our own people has saved us hundreds of thousands of dollars over using temps.

We operate 11 deferent tax sites, with the same rules, management and processes.

In the first two months of tax season we did 24,000 tax returns at a cost of about $80 per return (just over $500,000). We have increased hours, 11 sites. We are open 6-7 days per week. We have 4-5 preparers on weekdays, and up to 25 preparers on Saturday.

We have grown at 25-30% per year. We have over 20 funders (banks and foundations), and they each want their own reports. Because there was such a buzz, we have had to build the systems and processes to support this reporting. Our goal is to drive down the cost of tax preparation.

We learned several lessons. Paid preparers reduced our costs. Year-round operations cost over $600,000. High costs delivered quality. We need a lot of cash on hand to float the difference between funders who only pay upon seeing results and the people who want money immediately. This model is very management-intensive.

We have a lot of different types of partners - from H&R Block to the City. We have fire code issues with some of our sites. We need to control for risk much better than we do today. We need more permanent staff. This works because of the high concentration of low income families in our city. We can funnel customers to a huge community network for a variety of services.

We wanted to provide financial services (education, credit union services, and free tax prep) through employers. The services have been well received, and we have had pretty good participation. We wanted to explore employers as a potential channel to reach low-wage workers. Employers are the source of most of the financial transactions for these workers. Employee turnover for this working group tends to be high and expensive. Employers have regular opportunities to reach this group.

Where the HR staff was excited, we saw very good up-take. Some employers have gone beyond the scope of the pilot to offer other services, including financial literacy programs and underwriting emergency loans. Employers who provided some outreach or paid time saw better participation. Employers who had high turnover or low HR buy-in had lower participation. It took a lot more of our time than we expected to make these programs work.

We are out of the pilot phase, but we're still small. We want to work more with the employers who are bought in, and we want to work with local workforce intermediaries. We are collecting data from the last three years on tax prep and financial education from one of the employers -- we feel this data will help us attract more employers.

Some of the tools that we have developed will be very adaptable to other employers, including outreach materials and referrals to other providers. We want to cast our net wide to attract additional employers. We want to find a way to measure the benefits that we're providing, including an employee turnover model. We want to partner more with workforce intermediaries. Some things should be centralized, but it is important to customize the services for each employer.

We believe that tax preparation has achieved scale. So what role is there for a small community organization in an industry that has achieved scale? We got into EITC because we saw tremendous economic benefits for families that were tremendously underutilized. In our local market, we have achieved scale over the last ten years. Tulsa had the highest numbers of EITC filings in the country, and we had more market share for our particular segment than H&R Block.

What we have not achieved is financial sustainability for families. This challenges our business model because people are coming in for tax prep, and we're trying to deliver financial education and planning. So how can we shift some of our work to H&R Block in such a way that they would take on what we're trying to achieve while still achieving a bottom-line impact? This business is very challenging -- there is very little customer loyalty and they have a huge infrastructure that lies dormant for most of the year.

We sat down with them and explained some of the non-obvious lessons that we have learned over the years of doing this work. We can learn some information in a tax interview that can lead to greater financial success for the customer. These customers would then see H&R Block as a strategic partner, and they might come back to use some of their additional services.

We were working with H&R Block's headquarters, who became excited. But because they are largely a franchised organization, we had a difficult time working with the local organization who saw us largely as a competitor. It is still potentially promising and scalable to work through a large business like Block. There are other parts of our work where we might be able to use their dormant capacity through the rest of the year.