EITC Issue Committee Meeting Minutes
June 11, 2008
1:00 pm
Teleconference

Program Owner

• Lee, Patricia

Designated Federal Official

• Morizio, Louis

Committee Members Present

• Birge, Eileen
• Cooper, Dale
• Jonathan, Sabby
• Leggett, John
• Patterson, Robert
• Tanna, Wayne
• Verwiel, John
• Wernz, Stan
• Widmer, Harris

Committee Members Absent

• Tanna, Wayne
• Villarreal, Josephina

TAP Staff

• Jenkins, Audrey
• Odom, Meredith

Other Attendees

• Foley, Barbara
• O’Brien, Mary

Public Attendee
Chang, Grace, Center of Budget Policy and Priority, Washington, DC

Welcome/Announcements/Review Agenda
John Verwiel welcomed IRS staff, members and public participants to the call.

Roll Call
Quorum Met

2008 EITC Proposal
John Verwiel opened the discussion with the “EITC on A Page” reference tool which he recommends using as an outreach tool as well as placing it in EITC the toolkit. The foundation of the recommendation is to have a consistent format for all EITC purposes of discussion that can be universally understood and recognized by all EITC stakeholders.

Stanley Wernz attended an E-File seminar and shared the EITC proposal with some of the practitioners. The practitioners agreed with the idea of having everything on one page that way they would have all of the information they need in front of them.

Patricia Lee agrees that the concept going on one page is a great idea and feels the committee did an excellent job on the proposal.  However, there are some areas of the proposal that need to be addressed to be sure all areas are covered. The EITC office reviewed the product and completed a small exercise in the office where each person used different scenarios using the reference tool to see if everyone came up with the same answers and didn’t.

Dale Cooper suggests that someone within the EITC office could walk through this proposal with the committee and help them present it from the way the service looks at it. Then there will be two different perspectives, one is from an outside user and the other is from a preparer.

Dale also mentioned that while the Web Based Tools subcommittee was reviewing the website, they realize there wasn’t a way to navigate from the table of contents directly to a desire chapter or context. This feature would very helpful and would make the website that much more user friendly.
 
Mary O’Brien suggests the EITC office will join in on the subcommittee calls to work through the issues of the proposals.

Louis Morizio suggests the Adhoc subcommittee members and anyone else that would like to work on this committee work close with the program owners.

Audrey Jenkins and Louis Morizio reviewed the Hawaii document and broke it down into 4 separate proposals;

• LITC
• VITA
• EITC on a Page
• Web Based Tools
• Training and Education Module

There will 5 separate subcommittees formed to review and finalize these each proposal. Audrey will send out an email asking for volunteers for each subcommittee with a due date. All proposals are to be worked and completed by the July meeting.
 
EITC Program Office
Patricia Lee suggests the committee decide on the approach the committee would like for the EITC Office to take as it refers to “EITC on A Page” or the committee could leave it up to the EITC Office.

Lee suggests that since the committee fells strongly about a search engine within the table of contents, items like this should be included in the proposal.