Area 7 Committee Meeting Minutes

August 18, 2003

Attendance

• Curitis Feese, Covina, CA
• Yvonne Gallegos-Bodle, Oxnard, CA
• David Robinson, San Francisco, CA
• Charles Taylor, Los Angeles, CA
• Laurie Keleman, Designated Federal Official

Not in Attendance

• Cheyanna Jaffke, Placentia, CA
• James Griffin, Walnut Creek, CA
• Chris Lowe
• Howard Perkins

Note taker

• Mary Peterson O'Brien

Guest

• Margaret Warren

Welcome/Announcements/Review Agenda
Charles Taylor opened the business meeting. Charles welcomed all members and guests. The agenda was reviewed and accepted with no changes.

Roll Call
Mary Peterson O'Brien took the roll call. Five members are present; therefore, there is not enough members for a quorum.

Review/Approve Minutes
Charles reviewed the minutes from the previous teleconference. No changes were made and the committee approved the draft minutes.

Joint Committee Report Out
Charles gave a brief synopsis of the last joint committee meeting.

Guest Speaker
Mary introduced Margaret Warren, Director of Partnership and Partnership Development (P&PD), Wage & Investment (W&I). Margaret discussed the organizational structure of her department in W & I. She also explained the mission of P & PD. The mission is to develop relationship with national key organizations that reach low-income taxpayers. Some of these groups include those who are less proficient in speaking English, handicapped groups, elderly groups, etc. They are also charged with creating educational and outreach materials to all W & I customers. The product and development group is responsible for developing educational materials for all of their programs. Instead of working one on one, the role is now directed towards partnerships as a facilitator, technical content providers. We try to find organizations to leverage existing services with community resources. One of the key components is offering financial literacy training and asset building opportunities such as opening and maintaining bank accounts and buying a home. Part of this education is informing taxpayers about tax credits that they may not know is available such as the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC) and Child Tax Credit. They also help with tax preparation assistance such as VITA. The IRS could not help all taxpayers without working with interested partnership groups.

Asset Building and Financial Education: The IRS does not have its own financial literacy program. Instead, they give information out about other programs that are out there. At the National Level there is a memorandum of understanding with the FDIC and their money smart program to use this curriculum. Margaret also discussed a few other programs that are out there such as Jump Start targeted at the youth. Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac that discusses maintaining and building credit. Margaret also discussed what the IRS has on its own website: www.irs.gov the Digital Daily. She encouraged the panel to look at Understanding Taxes on this site. This site is an interactive site that has teacher plans, different lessons on taxes, the history of taxes.

Ways to implement financial literacy curriculums: We begin by identification of partnership groups in May or June. The purpose is to begin well in advance of the filing season

Question: How do you find these programs on the Internet? Each curriculum is listed on the business' web page. Mary stated that she sent all panel members a list of links to these sites. She also ordered the Money Smart CD for each panel member.

Question: Charles asked if there was any IRS funding to any of the financial literacy programs. Margaret stated that all of these curriculums are provided free. As far as funding from the IRS, there are no grants. There is no congressional provision that allows this and there is also no budget.

Question: How does the IRS choose organizations to partner or work with?

The IRS is industry channel focused. There is a channel for financial institutions, government agencies, educational institutions, large employers, and for volunteer community organizations. This group is only in its third year of existence and is still growing. They look for groups that are on the cutting edge and also for groups that are interested and could help fund to help financial literacy, strengthen families, etc. Margaret stated that if you know of such groups, she would be happy to gather that information. Currently there is approximately 160 existing or emerging community based coalitions.

Question: On all of the websites for financial literacy researched so far (other than the IRS website), there is no module on taxes. Does the IRS plan on doing anything about this?

Initially, the IRS is trying to leverage the programs that exist and has not worked on this at this time. This is an excellent point for this group to work on. There is no strong tax element in these curriculums at this point.

Pending Issues
Cheyanna was unable to attend the meeting; therefore, it was decided to discuss the Offer-in-compromise issue at the next meeting.

Yvonne gave an update on the Installment Agreement Issue. Yvonne thought that it was really a problem that the taxpayer could not calculate a balance due by himself or herself because of compound interest. She wrote a statement of problem and would like everyone to read it. The committee agreed to review the document and discuss it at the next conference call.

Charles discussed Adult Education. Charles participated on an EITC/VITA task force in Los Angeles . He would really like to work on the tax component of the adult curriculum and would like to work more with this and involve the EITC/VITA task force. He thinks that this would be a valuable service and a great legacy to leave.

Annual Report
Charles, David agreed to meet directly after the teleconference to discuss the annual report with Mary.

Outreach
Charles discussed that at the last EITC/VITA task force that they were interested in working with the TAP panel. Laurie asked if there were panel members in the Los Angeles area interested in participating in a workshop with congressional aides in September. Charles and Yvonne were interested in attending. Laurie will email the date and time to the entire panel.

Annual Meeting
Charles announced that he would not be able to attend the October annual meeting. He asked if everyone else would be attending. Mary stated that the committee should look at what they would like to accomplish at this meeting since there was going to be time allotted for the area committees to meet. It will be important to develop an agenda to be productive.

Charles asked if there is any word on new panel members and would they be at the annual meeting. Mary replied that the national office is working on getting new members on board; however, there is no word on when this would happen.

Public Input
No public input at this time.

Closing/Assessment
Charles concluded by asking the committee if there are any additional comments. There were no additional comments by the committee at this time and Charles adjourned the meeting.