Thoughts from the webmaster......

     When the webmaster first heard about volunteers helping low-income Taxpayers prepare and file their income tax returns,  he was ready to sign up and offer his services.  But ... .... it was not easy to do so.  There was no readily available information on the name of the program, and without knowing the name it was impossible to find out more.  So he called the national IRS toll free number, and the operators did not understand what he was talking about. Without knowing the name of the program he was interested in, they could not direct him to the right place. After being transferred to several different places, including the California FTB (after all, he wanted to volunteer in California..! ), he finally got the contact number of the IRS office in San Jose. 

    After getting through the hurdle of finding out how to volunteer,  the webmaster attended the first training session at the IRS Office on a cold first Saturday of January morning after reluctantly dragging himself out of bed.  He was fascinated to see how the training coordinator patiently answered the same questions over and over again while constantly being interrupted by a long line of volunteers.  One issue was that the final certification exam was scheduled for the last Saturday in January, and site assignments were to be made from certified volunteers based on individual preferences.  Anyone doing scheduling of this kind with about 200 volunteers and 20-30 sites knows it is not trivial, especially if the list needs to be created and distributed to impatiently waiting volunteers in a timely fashion.  Furthermore, communicating schedule and site assignment changes once the volunteers left was likely to be time consuming and frustrating for both coordinator and volunteers.

    It was around that time that the idea of a website came about, and the webmaster quickly set up a website and suggested using it for communicating time-sensitive information simply by providing the url to volunteers.  Since this was easier and more convenient than calling volunteers or emailing them individually, or having to take their calls one at a time, the idea was well received, especially when it was demonstrated how quickly information could be put up on the web on a small website.

    Initially the purpose of the website was to communicate information and answers to frequently asked questions during the tax season.  However, the difficulty in trying to volunteer showed the need for a way to let prospective volunteers find out easily how and where to volunteer.   After becoming a volunteer, the webmaster realized that just as volunteers were finding it difficult to volunteer, the program itself had the problem of being unable to find volunteers.  It is the goal of this website to offer a way for volunteers in Santa Clara County to get information once they had volunteered, and to provide information before the season started.

    Subsequently this website provided online volunteer registration by forwarding the information to the IRS Site Coordinator at the San Jose IRS office.  While this met the needs of volunteers needed for Santa Clara County,  many prospective volunteers interested in signing up for other counties also signed up because they did not know where else to go for information.  Sending the particulars of potential volunteers in Florida, New York, or Colorado to the San Jose Office was counter productive, since the best that office could do was forward it to the national office.  Getting one or two requests a month was tolerable, but getting such requests almost every other day started to get annoying.  So, a simple situation was to set up two registrations - one for Santa Clara County, and the other for non Santa Clara Counties.  Information for those  interested in Santa Clara County could be directed directly to the San Jose Office, and the rest of the enquiries directed to the national VITA office.

    At the San Jose Office in the past, interested volunteers contacted the Coordinator by phone and email. The Coordinator kept the contact information in lists, sheets of paper, drawers, etc and enter them into a spreadsheet as time permitted, and  data entry was complete only when it was time to start volunteer training and assignment to sites.  The problem with voicemail and email from volunteers was the information provided was not always complete, and required either return phone calls or email responses, and introduced additional errors when information was transferred from other media to the spreadsheet.

    Since much work of organizing volunteers at the San Jose office is done in the last part of the year, keeping a running list of interested volunteers throughout the year to contact prior to the tax season was a chore, and volunteers could never be sure if they were on a current list to be contacted.  Consequently, interested volunteers are encouraged to join the vita-information Yahoo!Group where registration announcements are made.  Note that no other information besides the contact email address is required to sign up for this group that acts as an email list of interested volunteers who want to be informed when it is time to register.  Once the prospective volunteer has been contacted about training for the upcoming season, there was no reason to stay on the list, and the sensible thing is to unsubscribe from the list.  Returning volunteers also sign up on  this list so that they do not miss the end of year announcement.

    The webmaster regrets not being able to answer each inquiry individually; however, it his still his wish to simplify the process by which volunteers can find sites suitable to them, and vice versa.  So, all volunteers since May 21, 2007 signing up on the non Santa Clara County site will have their locations, date of signup and first and last initials  (the initials may be reversed to confuse the issue a little) shown by city.  If site coordinators and/or IRS VITA Coordinators in different parts of the country are looking for volunteers, they may at least be aware that some anxious volunteers ready and able to contribute their time and energy to a worthy cause have signed up through this site, and that their contact information has already been sent to the IRS.  While the technology to pinpoint the address of each prospective volunteer on a street map exists, this is not being done for privacy reasons.  The combination of initials, zip code and date of signup are sufficient for coordinators to verify that in fact they have received information about the particular site from the SPEC offices, and for volunteers to know that they have not been forgotten.

    The logical next step is to direct enquires immediately to the relevant coordinator according to the zip code of the prospective volunteer.   This requires a list of IRS VITA Coordinators at the various offices all around the country.  However, since such a list is not available from the National IRS Office in electronic form, this simple process cannot be implemented due to lack of data.   However, that office does encourages prospective volunteers to call in on the IRS 800 number.

    If individual IRS VITA Coordinators would like to receive particulars of prospective volunteers directly, and willing to provide a contact email address, the webmaster is willing to consider implementing that capability.  The application in its current state is specialized to the needs of the San Jose IRS Coordinator, and would need to be modified for the needs of other Counties. To preserve the private information of volunteers, the location, name and email address of the IRS VITA Coordinator would have to be an @irs.gov email address, and validated by the IRS.  On the other hand, if you would like individual volunteers to contact you directly, a table of contact information by City or State can be put up on this site.  To avoid nuisance emails due to your email being harvested or screen scraped, your email address will not be provided on this website, only a forwarding address which can be changed at any time.

    This website runs on voluntary effort, with information provided by the San Jose IRS Office.  Any questions relating to scheduling or training in other counties should be entered into the comments section of the registration form so that the IRS may direct them appropriately.  Registering multiple times on this website with the same question is unlikely to get any faster response.  If you really need an immediate response, the most productive way is to call the IRS national toll free line, and go through the telephone tree process.