EITC and Tax Preparation Organizational Design Charrette

On March 16 & 17, 2006 a group of about 45 people met as guests of the Chicago Federal Reserve to consider the future of the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC) tax preparation field and the development of the National Community Tax Coalition. The participants included representatives of community-based organizations involved in VITA (Volunteer Income Tax Assistance) as well as government and for-profit firms. The meeting was co-sponsored by the National Community Tax Coalition and the Aspen Institute and funded by the Annie E. Casey Foundation.

The focus of the group was on issues such as understanding how we might collectively define “scale,” “sustainability,” and “impact” for the EITC, how to optimize the number of families receiving the benefit of EITC, and on how to leverage the EITC to help lead families toward wealth creation and poverty alleviation.

Through a series of collaborative activities, participants explored the key concepts, projected forward to 2012 to envision the broad social situation and the infrastructure, operating concepts, and business models of for-profit and non-profit organizations in the tax counseling and preparation field.

There was also extensive discussion of the broad differences between various NCTC member organizations, and by the end of the workshop, participants understood that they are working on three very different topics:

• Tax preparation services
• The EITC
• Wealth-building and poverty alleviation strategies using tax prep and EITC to reach the target group of individuals and families.

The tax prep and EITC services appear to be at or nearing scale, and thus maturity, in many communities, and are therefore entering into a more stable phase of operations in their life cycle, while wealth building and poverty alleviation are still in the early stages of their development.

Looking forward, the workshop identified numerous opportunities for NCTC and its members to continue to progress in the development of new strategies, initiatives and projects as part of their shared mission to improve the lives of lower and moderate income families. Possible future projects include development of increased shared infrastructure, training programs, and branding and outreach initiatives.

The sponsors and organizers would like to thank all the participants for their dedicated work during the session, and would also like to acknowledge the gracious support of the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago.

This web site is a record of the event at the Federal Reserve Bank in Chicago, Illinois. The documentation of the session includes text and images that were captured throughout the course of each day of the session and captures each group's work chronologically (in the order that things happened). The text is not a transcription of the event. Rather, it represents the documentor's synthesis of the team reports and group discussions.

This record is intended as a reminder to the participants of the conversations that took place during the summit, as a stimulus for further conversation and it serves as an artifact of the group's work.

For anyone who was not present at the event reading this, you may lose some of the energy and creativity the participants expressed - and some of the ideas may not translate completely without that context. If you have any questions about the content or anything that is represented here please speak to someone that participated in the process or Langdon Morris at InnovationLabs.

Photographs of participants and the scribing are included throughout the Real Time Record. To view a larger version of a board, click on the thumbnail image. The larger image will open in a new window.

Session Design, Facilitation and Documentation by

Langdon Morris
Bryan Coffman
Michael Kaufman
Jay Smethurst