Broke, USA by Gary Rivlin

Author:Gary Rivlin
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub, pdf
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2010-05-24T21:00:00+00:00

Tax preparers who cater to the professional classes typically don’t start feeling around-the-clock stressed-out until late February or March. In Ogbazion’s world, the tax season starts in mid-January. By mid-February, when many in the middle and upper classes are only starting to think about their taxes, Ogbazion has filled out more than 80 percent of his client’s tax returns. “People basically start bombarding us with calls at the end of December,” Ogbazion said. “Can I do my taxes with my pay stubs? Do I have to wait for the W-2? It’s nuts. Basically come the first of the year, people want their money.”

Or sooner. In 2006, Jackson Hewitt started offering something it called the pay-stub loan. These are loans made in December based on the promise of next year’s refunds after an examination of a person’s pay stubs. “It was a bad idea,” John Hewitt said, but the paystub loans were proving popular with Jackson Hewitt’s customers and he felt he has no choice but to follow suit. “Jackson Hewitt had a one-year monopoly on paystub loans but the next year the banks let us and Block and the mom and pops do it.” The consumer advocates were apoplectic about this new product costing the working poor even more money, but it was a moot point. “The banks lost tens of millions of dollars doing these things,” Hewitt said. “They all basically said, ‘Never again.’”

There have been other controversies. Mainly the authorities have been concerned with nomenclature rather than the nature of these loans. Over the years the attorneys general in several states, including California and New York, have rebuked the tax preparers over the language they use to advertise the service. “You can’t say you’ll get your refund back in a day or two,” Ogbazion said. “They’re very big on that: ‘It’s not a refund; it’s a loan.’” These cases have cost the Big Three millions in fines as they’ve stretched the boundaries of what’s permissible but Ogbazion finds the whole thing ridiculous. “Our customers know exactly what’s going on,” he said. “They know it’s a loan.” To him the authorities fine them over wording because they can’t do anything about what really troubles them, which is that his customers choose to use his product. Over the years, Ogbazion watches H&R Block and learns from them. “We basically follow their lead,” he says.

Ogbazion also has little use for critics of the refund anticipation loan. In their study of the 2006 tax season, the product’s two most prominent critics, Chi Chi Wu at the National Consumer Law Center and Jean Ann Fox at the Consumer Federation of America, found that more than 12 million Americans spent a collective $1.24 billion in interest and fees because they were either too desperate or too impatient to wait a few weeks for their refunds. The study went on to advocate a “RAL Reform Agenda” that called for greater regulation of commercial tax preparers, better funding for free tax preparation programs—and a ban on tax loans made against the earned income tax credit.

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