Tax Clinic students fight for clients’ rights, file potentially precedent-setting appeals
The client worked at a minimum wage retail job earning $13,000 a year and was the family’s sole breadwinner. Because she and her aging mother had agreed to foster a relative’s child whose parents had been incarcerated, she filed a federal tax return claiming the earned income tax credit and advanced child tax credit, both of which are designed to benefit low-income households.
Then an IRS audit ruled her ineligible for those benefits – which would have brought an additional $5,000 into the household – saying the child’s foster care status did not qualify her as a dependent for purposes of these credits. But thanks to tenacious legal research and petition-filing by a Harvard Law School student working in the Tax Clinic of the Legal Services Center at HLS, the IRS ruling was overturned and the client received much needed additional income.
Leveling the playing field
Low-income clients come to Harvard’s Tax Clinic because they need an advocate to fight for their legal rights – rights that are meaningless if clients lack access to a lawyer to stand up for them.
Tax debt and the liens which the IRS files can prevent clients from getting jobs, while fixing tax problems allows them to reenter the job market and has a positive impact on their credit ratings.
Tax Clinic clients are military veterans, immigrants, or survivors of domestic violence. They find themselves under audit or in Tax Court because they have been victimized by scoundrel fly-by-night tax preparers who submit faulty returns on their behalf. Or they have survived abusive domestic relationships only to discover that spouses kept them in the dark about nefarious, unreported financial dealings that have potentially devastating tax consequences. Still others are vets who fail to file tax returns after losing jobs or businesses because they suffer from service-related post-traumatic stress disorder.
Filed in: Clinical Spotlight
Tags: Federal Tax Clinic
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