Chapter 7 Listening to our communities The Community Tax Law Project as an example of a low-income taxpayer community-focused service provider

Mission driven

Probably one of the most important aspects of all LITC work is to remain mission driven. If your clinic does not already have a mission statement, then you have some work to do. However, it does not need to be fancy, just effective. For example, the effective clinic mission of TaxAid is as follows: ‘TaxAid is a charity that helps people on low incomes when they get into difficulties with their tax affairs.’⁹ While this is just one example, TaxAid’s mission statement could be modified to become the guidepost of any clinic.

A good mission statement is one that provides an organisation with an effective tool to assess whether an action is going to help their intended community in the manner intended. Literally any action of an organisation could be analysed against the mission statement to see if that action makes sense to the clinic: from the purchase of office supplies to the decision to start serving a new subgroup of your geographic community.

Without going into a full discussion of what makes a good mission statement, no mission statement is much worse than not having a clear mission at all. There are many reasons to have a formal mission statement, but the point of a mission statement that is most relevant here is how it helps your clinic serve the community.

With a clear mission statement, clinicians have a rubric for making decisions that allow all work to be focused clearly on assisting your communities with their tax issues. For example, during the COVID-19 pandemic, CTLP was faced with many requests from community partners to assist with tax problems that had normally been addressed by other agencies. With these other agencies closed or severely diminished in capacity, CTLP was being pushed and pulled in many directions. During weekly (or sometimes daily) staff meetings, CTLP’s staff were able to quickly and accurately filter these decisions through a mission statement analysis. This allowed CTLP to keep addressing the needs of our community without jeopardising the overall integrity of the clinic. Without a clear and strong mission to guide your clinic, every decision will unduly burden your staff and slow your work down.

Community understanding and support

To truly make an impact in the economic lives of the taxpayer communities you serve, a successful tax clinic needs to focus simultaneously on two different yet symbiotic efforts. These efforts inform each other to further strengthen the community focus of a clinic. The efforts I am referring to are community understanding and community support. A clinic does not serve a community in the most effective manner without a good, focused effort in both connected areas.

To begin, your clinic should understand the communities it serves. This understanding can begin with basic demographic information, but it cannot end there without missing valuable information. A trip to the area can be informative, but even then, this is an isolated and disconnected effort. True understanding of a community is best obtained by a prolonged authentic relationship with the persons within the community that focuses on building relationships rather than pure observation. CTLP has found that the most effective way to build these authentic long-lasting relationships is to directly support these communities in many ways.

Elaborating on one specific example of community support, CTLP has had a very long-lasting relationship with a local Latino support organisation.¹⁰ While CTLP mainly provides tax legal assistance to the persons served by this organisation, our staff make a more concerted effort to support the population this organisation targets. Our staff regularly represent CTLP at many of their non-tax events, such as cultural events, leadership workshops and fundraising events. This may seem counterintuitive for the tax clinic to be showing up at community events that are unrelated to the main mission of the clinic. However, the trust that is built up by this continued authentic support is tremendous, and this organisation and the people they help utilise the services of CTLP without as much reservation as they would if we gave a ‘tax talk’ once a year. Furthermore, the continued relationship CTLP has had with this organisation has allowed for a much richer community understanding, allowing us to better advocate and represent this community when it relates to their tax issues.

As mentioned, the intertwining of community understanding and support can lead to trust. However, trust is earned and cannot be expected. The persons of communities that have been ignored or underserved for many years can become distrustful of anyone, let alone lawyers and accountants, promising to solve their problems. These persons have seen a myriad of ‘do-gooders’ come in and out of their lives promising results, only to be replaced each month by a new face with the same rhetoric. Tax clinicians will have an uphill battle to overcome this, but it can be done if your efforts are authentic and continue over time.

As a tax professional or tax clinic administrator, you can overcome these negative expectations and earn the trust of the taxpayers of the communities you serve, but tax clinic professionals need to be willing to put in the time and sincere effort. In the sections that follow, a framework for addressing populations with diverse demographic backgrounds and geographic locations will be discussed juxtaposed against the all-important resource limitations. Every clinic will have budgetary constraints that will surely provide realistic goals for reaching certain groups, especially when the population a clinic is trying to reach is in a remote location. Thankfully, due to the forced virtual lifestyle the global pandemic has imposed, online communications tools may make reaching distant populations more affordable than ever expected.

Geographic scope: where do your potential clients live, work, pray or play?

Depending on where your clinic is located and the proximity to other organisations providing similar assistance, your clinic first needs to clearly define what geographic area you will be serving. With a clear similarity to a mission statement, a clearly defined geographic scope can make many decisions very simple.

Providing the person in your clinic tasked with conducting client intakes with a list or map of the area you serve can shorten unnecessary conversations with taxpayers as to who you cannot or should not be serving. For some clinics serving an entire area such as a county or a state or even a nation, this is somewhat easy. In the US, this can be somewhat challenging, especially in states where there are a number of clinics in a densely populated area. For example, there are eight tax clinics in New York City and surrounding areas, let alone the rest of New York state.¹¹ In Virginia, there are two other clinics in addition to CTLP. However, CTLP is allowed, based on our grant application, to take cases from anywhere in the state. This would be confusing if the three Virginia clinics were not in communication with each other. Thankfully, the three clinics have defined their geographic areas and, more importantly, respect those boundaries. If someone calls CTLP from an area covered by the other clinics, we simply refer them to the correct clinic.

Geographic concerns of clinic scope are not limited to US LITCs. For example, the UK has only two standalone tax clinics covering the entire group of nations. Using a more specific example, the Scottish Tax Clinic is tasked with covering the entire geographic area of the country and its population of over five million people with only around twelve students and ten supervisors.¹² To compound the geographic challenges facing the Scottish Tax Clinic, Scotland has countless remote communities that have large low-income populations. In contrast, the Australian LITC system is much more robust, with ten clinics spread throughout the various territories, which provides each clinic with a much more manageable chance of reaching the communities they serve.

Demographic scope: how do your clients live, work, pray or play?

Now that you have located the populations within your scope of influence, you need to take the next step and find out more about what makes them unique culturally. Recalling the need for cultural understanding and support discussed earlier in this chapter, an effective clinic needs to have a good cultural understanding of the communities it serves. For some communities, this requires just showing up and talking to people to find out more about them and how they choose to live their lives. Other communities require a much more nuanced approach that may require a trusted partner, especially if there is a language barrier.¹³

In the university setting, a clinic may face internal bureaucratic impediments to clinic operation. For example, internal ethics review boards may need to provide approval before a clinic begins working with taxpayers in a certain manner, especially if the work of the clinic has a research aspect. Approval from an internal review board may take several months, stalling the clinic’s efforts, at least initially. However, in all cases, access to justice for taxpayers requires our clinics to make the necessary alliances to bridge cultural barriers. As with all community work, this takes time, but trust can be built with authentic efforts. Furthermore, building strong meaningful community relationships can lead to positive policy efforts by either the clinic or the communities the clinic serves. Working together to provide real-life examples of the impacts of the tax system on certain subpopulations can bolster any changes necessary to move the needle towards a more equitable tax system.

CTLP works with a number of refugee resettlement agencies to best serve the different populations that have arrived in Virginia as refugees.¹⁴ As the various refugee populations change over time, CTLP relies on strong relationships with the resettlement agencies to gain understanding of the current refugee population demographics and to even gain very specific understanding of cultural differences that may affect tax reporting decisions. For example, in the US, one choice of tax filing status is Head of Household,¹⁵ which is generally chosen only if you are not married but look after a dependent in your household. Some very traditional refugee populations chose this filing status over the appropriate joint status for legally married couples, which was very confusing to us at CTLP because it is more tax advantageous to choose the joint status.¹⁶ Upon reaching out to our partners in the refugee resettlement space for more information, we began to understand that choosing the joint status would put husband and wife on an equal footing, removing the husband as the true ‘head of household’, bringing disrespect on the family from their community.

Without this connection, we would still be trying unsuccessfully to convince some families to file their taxes with a focus purely on finances rather than a combination of culture and finances. As much as possible and always refusing to support morally repugnant legal positions, CTLP attempts to support cultural requests when providing our services and also advocating for similar efforts within the taxing authority systems. Furthermore, partnering with additional support groups may be necessary to bridge the cultural gap inherent in our tax systems.

Resources and limitations

You may be wondering how you can make all of these important cultural connections while juggling all of the other requirements you have for running your clinic. All of this community engagement sounds fantastic, but how do you find the time? Furthermore, time is not the only resource needed for community outreach: you will want brochures, business cards, as well as the basics such as somewhere to physically meet your potential clients. To use a cliché, Rome was not built in one day, so neither will a tax clinic be.

To begin, a clinic should reach out to similar clinics in your nation, if they exist, or internationally, if you are attempting to create the first clinic in your country. A good number of international clinics attended the US LITC programme Annual Grantee Conference, which is a conference attended by clinicians from all of the US LITCs in their formative years.¹⁷ Additionally, the Center for Taxpayer Rights hosts their International Conference on Taxpayer Rights yearly, which intentionally includes a number of talks focused on the work of low-income taxpayers.¹⁸

Any new or established tax clinic should conduct regular needs assessments, which should include the personnel needed as well as the tangible items (such as computers and office supplies). If you identify needs that you cannot fulfil yourself, ask those you know – including colleagues and your institution – and expand outwards. A few years ago, CTLP was looking to create a more robust office space for our interns, so they could all be in one area with equivalent office equipment. Through a simple ask to our board of directors, we received offers of multiple tables, chairs and filing cabinets. However, this ask does not have to be to directors working at large law firms. A simple social media appeal could provide you with what you need, especially volunteers.

Building a volunteer base is extremely rewarding but also time consuming. A well-functioning volunteer programme can provide much of the human resources needed to accomplish the tasks of a robust community-focused tax clinic. Moreover, these volunteers can provide you with a wide variety of skills from direct pro bono legal assistance to marketing and fundraising.

However, it is not as simple as a quick Tweet or request for help on social media. CTLP ran a successful volunteer programme for many years, but it took time to build this programme and make it work well. In fact, CTLP continues to tweak and refine this programme to adapt to our changing needs. At one point, CTLP had a pro bono panel of over sixty tax professionals, but only around thirty of these lawyers and accountants were active each year. This left a number of volunteers without any cases to work on: something that does not provide the volunteer with a very meaningful experience. To address this issue, CTLP made the decision to scale back the number of tax professionals to a number more in line with our case needs, while also adding additional student interns to round out the programme.

Learn from failures

Not every community effort works – at first.¹⁹ For example, CTLP decided to focus more directly on veterans of the armed services. We reached out to organisations specialising in veterans’ affairs, creating exciting new community partners. We secured funding from private and government sources. We created brochures and presentations outlining the tax issues facing veterans. Finally, we spent one year conducting as much outreach and education in the veteran community as possible. We did a great job – or so our community partners said. Sadly, when reviewing the case numbers at the end of that year, we found that we had served a similar number of veterans as the previous preceding years.

What had happened? We did everything correctly from a community-based approach. We listened to the community, we showed up repeatedly and authentically, and we gave the community what they had asked. What we had failed to do was understand our own prior efforts as well as the overarching effect of our efforts with other communities: we did not look at the bigger picture. In fact, we were already effectively reaching the veteran community because that community is cross-sectional with other communities CTLP serves well. It was not wasted time, as we now have some very strong community partners that focus on issues facing veterans. However, we now know to consider overlaps with other communities when CTLP considers reaching out to a new one.

Infrastructure: are bricks and mortar a thing of the past?

In recent memory, an office had to have the basic office items, such as desks, chairs, computers, printers, photocopiers, filing cabinets and maybe even a water cooler to gossip around. There is a question as to whether a tax clinic needs these things anymore. At this point, I would argue that a tax clinic needs some of these, most importantly a computer and a phone, but I think that there is a valid argument that these items do not need to be in one place. CTLP currently has a bricks and mortar office with desks, computers and phones (thankfully no water cooler), but we functioned very well in a remote version of our office in the early months of the 2020 pandemic.²⁰

In fact, CTLP is exploring ‘flex’ options where, instead of having one main office, we have a number of shared office spaces throughout the Commonwealth of Virginia. These offices would be strategically placed to address the geographic needs of the communities we serve. We have seen that we can afford three ‘flex’ offices for the same expense as we are currently paying for one large central office. Whether this is an option for every tax clinic depends on the communities served and the geographical areas covered. The majority of CTLP’s clients were able to adjust to virtual communication quite successfully during the pandemic. However, you may find that the populations you serve will not trust you unless they can meet you face to face.

Experimenting with new versions of the ‘office’ may lead to a better understanding of the way your clinic interacts with the taxpayers it serves. Ultimately, there is no longer one correct way to approach this infrastructure question. Rather, the correct office environment is the one that reaches the most low-income taxpayers in an impactful and cost-effective manner.

Community partners: you cannot reach everyone by yourself

Every tax clinic that comes into existence has some sort of community partnership they can create. I cannot think of a single exception to this statement, no matter how remote your clinic is or specific your client base may be. There is always someone else providing services to the taxpayers you are seeking to help. On the other hand, I will agree that no tax clinic has the same set of community partners as the next.

CTLP serves the entire Commonwealth of Virginia, from the former coal-mining rural southeast to the shipping industry of the Tidewater area of the state. As each of these communities is different from the next, so are the community partners that CTLP uses to reach the taxpayers in need in these areas. Some communities congregate around their churches while others seek out help from the government. Unless the organisation is morally objectionable, CTLP will form a partnership with that group to meet our mission of providing access to justice. To serve the migrant farm worker populations, CTLP has communicated with tienda owners,²¹ as this is a central neutral location where migrant farm workers congregate at least weekly, usually on Sunday afternoons. In contrast, to reach low-income African American taxpayers in the east end of the city of Richmond, CTLP partners with a combination of government agencies and private community resource centres in order to reach these communities.

Social capital: the who, what and when of building your clinic family

As alluded to, you can build an effective sustainable tax clinic on your own, but you can build an even more effective tax clinic with some help. Indeed, taking a group approach will make the entire experience infinitely more effective and enjoyable. Social capital has been defined as relationships that can make your organisation more effective.²² When you add more people into your organisation, your social network expands exponentially, which, in turn, exponentially grows your availability of resources, both human and tangible. Returning to the example above, the social network CTLP’s board of directors provides has allowed for CTLP to quickly ask for donations of tangible goods to meet our infrastructure needs.

Who you have in your tax clinic’s social network really depends on the needs of your tax clinic. If you are in the beginning stages of creating a clinic, you should probably look to the people who are going to assist you in dealing with the red tape of opening a clinic. This may include the director of the local legal services office, who may be open to housing your clinic, or it may include a tax professor at the local university who sees value in providing a clinical experience for their students. Each meeting with a potential addition to your social network should be met with open-mindedness, regardless of any preconceived notions of what the relationship might look like.

For example, in an arranged meeting with the president of the local association of public accountants, one might hope to find some volunteers for a clinic through their membership. When you actually meet with this person, you find out that, in addition to providing you access to potential volunteers, this person also owns a number of office buildings and is willing to provide you with free office space. Results like this only occur if you remain mission focused and let your social capital know of the needs of your clinic.

Returning to the idea of community understanding and community support, a tax clinic would be well served by applying these thoughts to the building of a social network in addition to the people in the communities you are serving. First, a clinic director can streamline effective networking for social capital by understanding the culture of other potential social groups. For example, CTLP fundraises extensively within our social networks, soliciting donations from individuals from many communities. The majority of our large donations come from tax attorneys, due to their specific understanding of the main legal work of CTLP. These tax lawyers understand what effort is needed to address a controversy with the IRS or the US Tax Court. However, CTLP also gets a considerable number of individual donations from people in the community who believe that everyone should have access to justice regardless of their income or their legal problem.

When soliciting funds from these groups, CTLP communicates differently about the work of CTLP. The tax professionals receive a letter describing a tax controversy CTLP has worked on successfully, with all the tax details. Whereas, the social justice donors receive a letter that focuses more on how justice was served and the family is now back on their feet financially. Both letters may have described the same tax controversy just using language that each social group could relate to more effectively.

Furthermore, a tax clinic should support the efforts of those in their social network as much as possible. Just as a clinic may show up to a low-income neighbourhood breakfast, just to show support and build relationships, the same clinic may attend a legal awards ceremony where one of their main pro bono attorneys is being honoured. As mentioned previously, there is no expectation that there will be a single discussion about tax at either of these events, but your pro bono supporter will remember that you attended their special event, making your tax clinic that much more special to them.

The idea of showing support to all involved in the tax clinic is a type of giving back to those that give to your clinic in a different way. There is not a lot that a low-income taxpayer clinician can give to a tax professional at a big firm other than their time and appreciation. CTLP has a very special patron who has supported CTLP in many ways for almost the entire thirty years of our existence. This special person gives more of their time, passion and money to CTLP than any other person. They do so similarly for a number of other organisations and foundations. CTLP makes a point of attending as many events related to this person as possible. This is well appreciated and their support for CTLP continues and grows. Without conscious social capital building, this would not have happened in such a fruitful manner.

Finances: the lights do not stay on with positive thoughts and well wishes

While much was stated above about social capital building for a tax clinic, knowing the right people does not always pay the bills. Every clinic needs money. In the US, a number of the LITCs rely on volunteer time or having law students assist the clinic under the supervision of a professor. However, even within these clinic models, funds are needed to pay for operational costs, salaries of related staff and professors, and other related costs. If a US clinic qualifies for a ‘LITC Grant’,²³ that clinic will receive funding up to $100,000. Some other clinics, such as CTLP, also receive grants from other sources such as the state government or private foundations. The funding sources for your clinic will depend on your country, locality and affiliation. The UK national charity TaxAid is a good example of a low-income taxpayer assistance organisation that receives support from a number of private sector sources.²⁴ Unfortunately, regardless of your tax clinic design, the need for funds does not change.

A tax clinic can start with the people in their social circle. If a tax clinic is part of a university business school or law school, conversations should start with the person in charge of raising funds for the business school or law school. That person may be very excited about a new strategy for gaining additional funds that includes the work of a tax clinic. In this discussion, a clinician should highlight measurable successes that the clinic has had especially when assisting communities that the university has demonstrated an interest in helping. In many university settings, a particular donor may earmark or endow their donation to be spent in a particular way, such as funding a tax clinic. A little creativity mixed with a strong mission can go a long way towards leveraging your social capital to raise actual money for your clinic.

There is one important caveat to a general leveraging of social capital to raise funds. While the clients of your clinic are included in your social sphere, you should not consider asking or even accepting unsolicited donations from clients. Most clinics do not accept funds from current clients. There is an argument that this is not empowering to the client who wishes to give something back to the clinic that helped them. However, due to the low income of our clinics’ clients, as well as the usual accompaniment of other financial issues, accepting donations from current clients does not fit with the sentiment of helping someone out of financial difficulty. If, a number of years later, a client donates to your clinic, that is a different conversation. Hopefully, your clinic was part of the solution that allowed that person to get back on their feet enough to give you a gift. In the meantime, a clinic would be best served by avoiding such situations.

Community advocacy

Community advocacy is the most grassroots approach to advocacy that a tax clinic can undertake on behalf of the communities they serve. This form of advocacy is essentially informed and directed by word of mouth.

For CTLP, this type of advocacy happens all of the time to whoever will listen. The idea is for the tax clinician to voice their wishes for change as often and widely as possible. This begins with your clients. You tell them what is wrong with the system and that is why they are being affected negatively by the tax system. Next, we move to the streets. At community events, we talk to people not only about the problems we see but also the potential for solutions. Sometimes, CTLP is even invited to speak with local officials and politicians, but the conversation does not change. We state what we are seeing as negative effects of the tax system on low-income taxpayers and propose solutions. Sadly, this method is slow, but it creates a groundswell of ideas for change.

Administrative advocacy

In the US, the government often asks for comments on proposed laws, regulations and procedures. This is very true in the US tax system where the IRS or the Department of Treasury will ask for comments on either a proposed law or procedure in advance of implementation. Much of this input is directed through work of the American Bar Association Section of Taxation. Furthermore, the IRS has an internal issue reporting system called the Systematic Advocacy Management System (SAMS) where a systematic issue can be brought to the attention of the IRS.²⁵ CTLP makes use of all these avenues as much as possible. The attorneys at CTLP are active in both submitting comments to the IRS, Treasury and using the SAMS system. Hopefully, the tax administrative body in your country or locality has a similar system that you can use to advocate for systematic changes, no matter how small.

Litigation as a venue for change

In common law jurisdictions such as the US, an attorney can change the law by setting precedent via litigation. This is a lengthy process, as it requires the attorney appealing their case to as high a court of review as possible. Taking such action also requires that the facts of your client’s case are exactly those that show the problem with the law you are looking to resolve. Finally, in the alignment of the litigation stars, your client has to be willing to work with you for the long haul. Despite all of these barriers and hurdles, low-income taxpayer clinics in the US have been able to show injustice in a number of areas of the law effecting change eventually at the legislative level.²⁶ As this type of legal work takes a number of very specific legal skills, this is a perfect time to leverage your social capital and work with pro bono attorneys in larger firms looking to work cases like these regardless of the legal costs.

Governmental advocacy

The final type of advocacy that I will briefly mention is not possible for all clinics due to the nature of their business structure and the sources of their funding. However, this section considers legislative lobbying. This concept may be addressed under a different title in your country. However, generally in the US, lobbying is defined as an attempt to influence government action, either by written or oral communication.²⁷

In the US, nonprofit entities are limited to the amount of direct lobbying that they may undertake before they lose their status as a not-for-profit entity.²⁸ Further limitations may be placed on the lobbying of clinics by funding sources. However, a small amount of lobbying is allowed and can be a great way for a tax clinic to make a big impact. There are major concerns with taking on this type of advocacy work, as it is very specialised, highly political, and, as mentioned previously, can result in a clinic violating the laws of the type of business entity it is arranged under.

Most large law firms have staff that specialise in this type of work, so a clinician could ask one of their tax related pro bono attorneys to inquire if the lobbying services of their firm would also be available. As with any proposed legislation, there is a very real risk that the legislation can have unforeseen results. While a solution to a tax problem affecting many of your clients may seem very clear to you, your proposed legislation could have ripple effects in other areas of the law that you are not familiar with.

Furthermore, a clinician should familiarise themselves with the political process in their area, as well as which politicians may be the best advocate for a proposed piece of law. Finally, a clinic should proceed with extreme caution when attempting this type of advocacy, and whenever possible, a clinic should consult with legal professionals who advise on lobbying prior to moving forward. Making a legislative change is a major accomplishment, especially when the legislation is tax focused. Armed with caution and the right support, this option is definitely worth attempting for a low-income clinic looking to make a lasting change in the lives of the taxpayers they serve.