SPEC Overview
Stakeholder Partnerships, Education & Communication
Key Messages
• The SPEC business model incorporates an indirect approach to community and tax assistance, emphasizing collaboration with other and naming relationship management as a key business strategy.
• SPEC combines three components that support a success: tax awareness and education tax preparation assistance, and financial literacy.
• In three short years, SPEC has established nearly 200 national partnerships and has worked with communities to build 180 coalitions, representing thousands of local organizations.
What is SPEC?
SPEC is the outreach and education function of Internal Revenue Service’s Wage and Investment Division. Its approach is to combine resources and goals with other organizations for better access to lower income populations in local communities.
SPEC’s customers are people who file individual income tax returns (Forms 1040). Groups that share the same customer base can join SPEC community coalitions that aim toward putting more dollars into taxpayers’ pockets.
SPEC’s mission shares the strategies of many community organizations in that it strives to assist taxpayers in satisfying their tax responsibilities by building and maintaining partnerships with key stakeholders, seeking to create and share value by informing, educating, and communicating with our shared customers.
What does SPEC do?
Since July 2001, SPEC has used a leveraged approach to taxpayer assistance. That is, it places an emphasis on partner involvement and introduces relationship management as a key element in it’s operations.
Organizations of all types—corporate, faith-based, non-profit, educational, financial, and government—have joined SPEC in community-based coalitions that help lower income people in their own neighborhoods.
Community coalition members work together. They have greater access to taxpayers, higher potential for expanded resources, and own the important intangibles of taxpayers’ credibility and trust. SPEC uses a three-pronged approach to coalition building: tax awareness and education, tax preparation, and financial literacy.
How does it all fit together?
Tax awareness and education
Coalitions often reach out with helpful tax information to people who can benefit from it. Partners educate families about tax issues like the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC), filing responsibilities, and locations of tax assistance, among others. When the working poor are struggling to pay for life’s essentials, the EITC is very welcome news. This message can be carried into the community easily and by many kinds of organizations that offer trusted programs already visible in communities.
Tax return preparation
Working together to help people get their tax returns prepared is the second component of SPEC’s approach. SPEC’s well known volunteer tax preparation programs (Volunteer Income Tax Assistance and Tax Counseling for the Elderly) draw eager responses from community leaders who have common goals and customers. Many coalitions are formed by partners who bring existing social or tax services to the table. Community Action Agencies and Senior organizations, for example, may bring expertise and volunteers so that a coalition’s centralized VITA site can be open five days a week for everyone from students to the elderly.
Financial literacy
Encouraging financial responsibility is the third component of SPEC’s three-approach to coalition building. SPEC and its partners educate low income taxpayers to asset-building opportunities. For example, banks and credit unions that are coalition members may offer incentives for low-to middle-income workers to open bank accounts, encouraging families to use a portion of their tax refunds to begin saving. Incentives like this often present an affordable way for taxpayers to begin asset building.
Claiming and receiving the EITC is often the first step in asset building. The EITC, tax preparation assistance, and financial incentives can help to provide the beginning of a dramatic lifestyle change for lower income taxpayers.
Life of their own
The range of community-based coalitions now in various stages of development shows dramatic promise in terms of the impact gained by so many diverse organizations working as a team. Building on mutual interests and benefits translates to greater help for more individuals at increased efficiency.
|
