Another Voice / Earned Income Tax Credit
Bill would help poor use law providing larger refunds
Updated: 07/11/08 6:37 AM
Annie Lewis, a nurses’ aide at Buffalo General Hospital in Western New York for the past 35 years, is a typically underpaid health care worker. Over these three-plus decades, Lewis has raised her children, some of her grandchildren, and currently her 6- year-old niece, Nadia, without ever making more than $29,000 a year.
Each spring, she paid to have her taxes done. She was never informed about the Earned Income Tax Credit, which provides a refundable income tax credit for low-and moderate-income working individuals and families.
The EITC, hiding in plain view, is one of the government’s best-kept secrets.
In 2007, Lewis’ union, 1199 SEIU, began a program in Buffalo that provided its low-wage members with free EITC counseling.
“Until then, I knew nothing about EITC,” Lewis says. “But last year, I got a refund of $4,500.”
The EITC was originally approved by Congress, and signed into law by President Gerald Ford in 1975, in part to provide an incentive to low-wage workers to remain in the work force. But each year, millions of EITC dollars go unclaimed because eligible workers don’t know about the program.
Last week, Sen. Charles Schumer and Rep. Rahm Emanuel introduced legislation to rectify the problem. Their bill, the Earned Income Credit Information Act of 2008, would require that employers notify their workers of their potential eligibility for the EITC.
While Schumer and Emanuel are Democrats, the EITC is hardly a partisan program. Years after Ford signed it into law, President Ronald Reagan called the EITC “the best anti-poverty, best pro-family . . . measure to come out of Congress.”
A California state version of the Schumer-Emanuel bill has already been enacted by Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger.
Since 1199 SEIU began EITC counseling for our members in Western New York in 2003, hundreds have participated and secured hundreds of thousands of dollars in back taxes that are rightfully theirs but that they would otherwise not know about.
We have also made counseling available to the working poor outside of our membership. For the working poor, this program has proven hugely beneficial in putting money back in their pockets. It is possible for a low-income worker to get back $5,000 for a single year, and some have gotten up to three years of retroactive taxes. One can imagine what it means for a low-income worker to receive a check for $13,000 to $14,000. We have seen this happen.
The EITC is not charity. It is the law, and it is aimed at returning to working families and individuals what is rightfully theirs. The problem is that they are not aware of it unless we inform them. The Earned Income Credit Information Act of 2008 would mandate that eligible workers be so informed.
George Kennedy is executive vice president of the Upstate Division of 1199 SEIU United Healthcare Workers East.
