Area 1 Committee Meeting Minutes
February 19, 2008
Teleconference

Designated Federal Official

• Fallacaro, Betsy

Committee Members Present

• Barry, Shaun - Chair
• Colombo, Paul
• Hom, Gim
• Jackson, Robert
• Jason, Julie
• Margulies, Howard
• Whiteside, Deidra
• Yandow, Robert - Vice Chair
• Zgoda, Bruce

Committee Members Absent

• Leggett, John

TAP Staff

• Jenkins, Audrey - Analyst
• Morizio, Louis - Manager
• Odom, Meredith - Management Assistant

Other Attendees

• None

Welcome
Barry welcomed everyone to the call

Roll Call
Quorum Met

DFO Report
Fallacaro gave an update on the meeting in Washington, DC, on the delivery of The Report to Congress.  Every year all Local Taxpayers Attend.   EITC Awareness Day was the end of January.  March 12, 2008 will be the congressional meeting and Fallacaro encourages members that can to attend to please do so.  The IRS has a W-4 program that Fallacaro suggests the committee take a look at it.  Jenkins will send this information out to the entire committee.

Joint Committee Report
Barry reported that the JC met earlier in the month but had no issues to take on.  The JC discussed outreach, recruitment and metrics.  The metrics will measure the success of TAP this year.  There is work being done at the JC level to figure out the number of issues that are elevated or recommended or approved or adopted by the IRS as well as outreach activity.  Someone is working to see whether to count the number of people that were touched or the number of outreaches that were done. 

Recruitment will start March 17, 2008.  Barry encourages the members to find individuals that may be interested in serving on TAP next year.  There are 2 openings in NY and there a few people rotating off this year.  Barry, Whiteside, Yandow have volunteered to do recruitment along with the TAP staff.  Whiteside gave an update on the documents that went out for recruitment which discussed qualifications and what’s expected as a panel member.  These documents will be reviewed to make sure they provide the correct wording.

Barry must create an Area 1 committee report on a monthly basis on the activities that were done. This was posted to TapSpace and notifications went out to members to view.

Area Outreach
Barry – participated in the EITC Awareness Day on January 31st at a site on Long Island, did outreach at the Bethpage Federal Credit Union and at IBM.

Colombo – did outreach on a flight, had a few short presentations, will do outreach at a club he is a member of and will do outreach at a luncheon in a few days.

Yandow, Robert– sent correspondence to a few newspapers to have information published, will be doing a presentation to the local rotary in March.

Jason – has a few outreaches planned for the near future.

Margulies - sent some letters out to the editors of the local papers, working with the board of his credit union to do some outreach 

Whiteside – did outreach at United Way along with Zgoda, did outreach with the community group of seniors.

Zgoda – had a TAP booth set up at an outreach for the banks in Buffalo, visited the senior citizens to discuss TAP, did an outreach at the Library, discussed TAP at an alliance outreach, discussed TAP at a Trade Show in Sacramento California, discussed TAP at a luncheon with Attorney’s and CPA’s.

Morizio informed the committee that there is a standard form on TapSpace for members to use to submit their outreach and staff will then input the information on to the database.

Barry asked that all members report outreach.  Morizio, Fallacaro and Jenkins are measured on the amount of outreach the members do.

Subcommittee Report-Out
Subcommittee 1
The committee discussed Social Security Numbers on checks and the committee feels that by replacing the full SSN with only the last four digits will protect the taxpayer from having too much information available to everyone who sees the check but allows IRS to do work on the database by using the name and the last four digits of the SSN.  This information will be forwarded to the entire committee later on this month.  The restrictions for the RAL’s are on hold until further information is received.  Electronic payments on the 1040 ES were submitted last year and the committee is waiting to see what the status of it is.  The 1099’s is becoming a problem and the committee is looking to see if there is anything that can be done to push the IRS into requiring the brokerage firms to adhere to the January 31st deadline.  There was a proposal to include interest on installment plans on the notice, and some research is being done on that.  On S-corps and LLC’s, the committee is looking to getting an expert to see if there is any kind of guidelines for owners to divide up salary versus capital gains distributions. Internet income is an item that is a significant contributor to the tax gap and will be discussed.  There was a discussion on some IRS locations that do not accept cash and the committee will look into recommending a solution to that.  The Required Minimum Distribution (RMD) recording to the IRS will be discussed.  Colombo asked the committee to add K1’s to the list of issues to be discussed.  Third party preparations will also be discussed in the next meeting.

Subcommittee 2
Yandow and Colombo were the only members on the call and didn’t raise any new issues.

Other Comments/Questions
Barry encourages subcommittee 2 to work some issues via email before the next subcommittee call.

Office Report
Jenkins informed everyone that the face to face meeting will be held in Boston, MA May 1 – 3, 2008.  Odom will send out an email requesting travel information from all members shortly.

Public Participation
None

Round Robin
Jason would like to submit some ideas to the Metric’s Committee, Morizio is welcoming all ideas. 

Colombo has been working with the LTA in his area. Colombo is now on the VITA Committee but will be doing some work for the notices committee.

Jenkins would like for all outreach to be sent to her in writing.

Yandow has been working on the recruiting and congratulated Whiteside on all of the changes she did on recruitment notifications, letters and forms.  Yandow hasn’t received any notifications for TapSpace this year.  Barry will discuss TapSpace with Morizio to see if they can resolve the issue with members not receiving notifications from TapSpace.

Jackson inquired about business cards and Odom explained the procedure for business cards.  When business cards are received, they will be sent out to members.

Closing Remarks
Barry encouraged both subcommittees to have two new issues to consider as a full committee to be sent forward to the IRS by the next teleconference in March.

Barry thanked the members for all of their hard work.