Minnesota Aggressively Educating Immigrants On Tax Laws
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Minnesota, MN, April 12, 2006 – Farah Adan doesn't make enough at his airport job to pay any income taxes, but he still feared he'd have to give Uncle Sam some money this year.
All the Somalia native knew was that the government collects a tax on income -- and he has an income, small as it is.
"I wondered, `Why are they going to take my money? This is unfair,"' Adan recalled about being reminded to file a tax return on his earnings as an electric cart driver at the Twin Cities airport. "Since then, I have learned about it, and I now understand that it is OK. But not at first."
In Minnesota, where African and Asian immigration is changing the work force, officials are mixing an aggressive marketing campaign with expanded tax services to persuade new immigrants and refugees -- many from broken countries with corrupt governments -- to voluntarily assess and pay their taxes.
The state wants its money, but it also wants to show the working poor that very often they'll get money back. Minnesota is targeting Somalis, Ethiopians, the Hmong, Russians, Hispanics and Latinos, Vietnamese and others in a campaign that outpaces other Midwestern states dealing with new immigrant wage earners.
The Internal Revenue Service provides many states with the training and computer software needed to offer free taxpaying clinics for low-income workers.
Beyond that, states develop their own levels of service. Wisconsin, for instance, offers tax information in Spanish on its Web site. The revenue agencies in Ohio and Illinois lean on private groups to teach newcomers about the tax system and help them obtain taxpayer ID numbers.
Minnesota, meanwhile, has four employees - from the Somali, Vietnamese, Hmong and Hispanic communities - who help coordinate some 300 free tax clinics and also promote their use in immigrant communities.
Last year, 112,000 returns were filed with the help of the tax preparation sites -- 21,000 more than four years earlier. While there are no statistics to show how many immigrants are served by the sites, anecdotal evidence shows an increasing number visited the sites this year -- particularly in Minneapolis.
"We are trying to build trust between the immigrant community and the Minnesota Revenue Department," said Sadik Farah, a Somali man who was hired by the agency to help craft its immigrant outreach program. "A lot of (immigrants) were mistreated in their home countries, and they carry that here. They have to trust me and see me as part of the community and not somebody who was `sent' by the government."
Besides the state's changing demographics, revenue officials said the program was needed because some immigrants have been the target of tax fraud schemes.
Two years ago, state officials accused 11 Somali tax preparers of attempting to inflate their clients' refunds. The state caught about 3,500 questionable returns -- filed primarily on behalf of Somalis -- and stopped payment on about $3 million in unwarranted refunds.
To increase the use of the free service this year, the Revenue Department for the first time -- in place of the scattered efforts of counties and cities -- sent 240,000 brochures to low-income workers across the state. Hennepin County, home to an urban core of immigrants and refugees in Minneapolis, sent 90,000 more fliers.
The state also increased the number of languages that can be interpreted at the tax sites to about 10. About $250,000 in state grants are funding the service this year and next, with volunteers providing the bulk of the work.
Sadik Farah wore several hats at a free taxpaying site set up at a school in the immigrant-heavy Cedar-Riverside neighborhood here, looking over the computers at each booth and then sitting down himself to go over tax returns with several people.
He spent 10 minutes with Farah Adan, who hauled a backpack full of books over his shoulder, telling him he must return in a week -- prepared to file a return. The April 15 deadline for filing returns was coming up fast.
What the 20-year-old Adan learned surprised him. Like most low-income workers, he discovered that he actually stood to get money back in the form of tax credits from the state and federal governments, though he didn't know how much. That will help as he is also trying to earn a high school diploma.
Grinning, he said, "I'll find out how much next week!"
By Gregg Aamot, Associated Press Writer
Source: The Associated Press
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