Occasionally, a news item will come across my desk that will cause me to do a double take. This story, reported on the PR Newswire, was one of those items: Wal-Mart will offer free tax filing services to eligible taxpayers in its parking lots.
Just let that sink in for a minute.
In fairness, it sounds a little more odd than it is. Wal-Mart Foundation has teamed up with United Way and One Economy Corporation to launch a free mobile tax filing clinic. The clinic will be staffed by IRS VITA (volunteer income tax assistance) volunteers and will be set up in Wal-Mart parking lots and office for two to three weeks at a time between February 10 and April 11. To find a parking lot location near you, visit www.myfreetaxes.com.
Individual taxpayers earning less than $56,000 per year will be able to file their taxes free of charge. Specific emphasis will be on making the EIC (earned income credit) available to lower income families.
The Foundation estimates that it will save taxpayers nearly $45 million in tax preparation fees. Now that’s rolling back prices.
It’s also brilliant marketing. If taxpayers find out that they are getting a few dollars back on their income tax return this year, they might be inclined to, say, spend those dollars at Wal-Mart. Just saying.
Last year, I posted about Wal-Mart’s aggressive stance on paying property taxes; not surprisingly, Wal-Mart isn’t a fan of paying property tax and has challenged a disproportionately high percentage of assessments for its stores (more than 2,100 property tax challenges nationwide). I titled the piece “Does Wal-Mart Want Your Kid To Read?”
Flash forward to this weekend. I was desperately searching for canning jars (a little known fact about taxgirl: I enjoy gardening). I called around and found a store that purported to have Mason jars, so we piled into the car and headed out. Along the way, at Route 202 and Swedesford Road near Berwyn, we saw a sign advertising a new Wal-Mart. There is no Wal-Mart near our home, and quite frankly, I’ve never had need for one. But if anyone has canning jars, it would be Wal-Mart, and the location was convenient. So, we decided to give it a try.
We pulled into the parking lot only to discover that the Wal-Mart had not yet opened. As we were leaving, I happened to notice something peculiar painted on the pavement. In giant white letters, at one of the intersections in the lot, the word “YEILD” (sic) was carefully painted. And then again. At every yield in the lot, the word “YEILD” (sic) is painted in letters at least 12 inches tall.
Apparently, the folks that painted the drive never heard of the “i before e” rule.
Hmm. Perhaps Wal-Mart should reconsider its stance on funding local schools…
Wal-Mart is the largest corporation in America, according to Fortune 500. According to Good Jobs First, Wal-Mart recently posted earnings of $350 billion in annual revenue and reported a profit of $11 billion (with a b).
One thing is clear about Wal-Mart: they don’t like to spend money. My mom always said, “That’s how the rich stay rich.” I guess she was right.
On its hike to the top, Wal-Mart has dodged fair pay with illegal workers at more than 61 stores in 2003 and followed it up in 2005, though Wal-Mart executives (of course) swear that they don’t know a thing about it.
In yet another blow to its image, an investigation of Wal-Mart’s local property tax records indicates that Wal-Mart systematically seeks to minimize its payment of taxes that support public schools and government services. Based on a large national sample of Wal-Mart stores and a review of all of its distribution centers open as of the beginning of 2005, Good Jobs First, a self-described “national policy resource center for grassroots groups and public officials, promoting corporate and government accountability in economic development and smart growth for working families” has concluded that Wal-Mart has filed assessment challenges at more than one-third of its facilities around the country. Additionally, Good Jobs First reports that, at many facilities, there have been appeals in multiple years, totaling more than 2,100 property tax challenges nationwide (you can download the report here as a pdf).
It seems that Wal-Mart doesn’t want to pay its fair share.
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When Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D – Nevada) pulled the immigration bill last week, the blame game started immediately. Conservatives blamed Liberals. Liberals blamed Conservatives. But nobody pointed the finger where it rightly belonged: at the American people.
While most surveys indicate that Americans aren’t opposed to an immigration bill that offers some form of amnesty to qualifying immigrants (though who qualifies has hardly been a consensus vote), most Americans are opposed to the cost of an immigration bill. In a recent poll, 70% of Americans agreed that illegal immigrants use more public services than they pay for in taxes. In a year in which government spending is increasing and the projected revenues are not, that means that Americans are loathe to embrace legislation that hits where it hurts the most: their own pockets.
And what a hit this bill would be. The Congressional Budget Office estimated that the bill as introduced would have cost the government as much as $126 billion over the next decade.
Where would the dollars go? Law enforcement measures including hiring additional workers and building the controversial fence along the US-Mexico barrier alone would cost $3.3 billion. In fact, more than half of the bill would fund law enforcement measures that will likely happen whether a comprehensive bill passes or not.
The remainder of the bill (nearly $50 billion) would be paid out to newly legalized immigrants in federal benefits. Over the next decade, it is estimated that legalized workers, guest workers and their families would claim $24.5 billion in tax refunds through the earned income credit and child credit, $15.4 billion in Medicare and Medicaid, $5.2 billion in Social Security benefits and $3.7 billion in food stamps and child nutrition programs. All billion with a b.
While it is estimated that there are between 11 and 15 million illegal immigrants currently in the United States, it’s difficult to gauge the their cost because much of the financial details are undocumented. Many employers are paying illegal immigrants “under the table” and that income escapes taxation not only on the immigrant level, but also on the employer level. As much as it is popular to blame immigrants, large scale companies like Wal-Mart fail to verify employment again and again – even after they were fined for federal employment violations – ostensibly because of economics. As long as Americans want to buy 10 tube socks for $1, companies like Wal-Mart will continue their hiring, sub-contracting and importing practices.
Despite the subversive nature of employing illegal immigrants, the conservative think tank, The Heritage Foundation, has made an attempt to quantify the cost. They estimate that for every dollar that an illegal immigrant receives, the US spends three dollars in services. This amount is, of course, disputed by those who again cite the undocumented nature of the income and claim that illegal immigrant taxpayers are on the rise. A story cited by the Tax Foundation indicates that undocumented workers are increasingly filing taxes, claiming that last year, 1.4 million people filed tax returns using ITINs (Individual Tax Identification Number) – a 40% increase.
This buffers the claim by proponents of the immigration bill who argue that, in the long run, tax revenue generated by new workers would offset virtually all the additional upfront spending. They advocate that it is likely that many of the immigrants who are legalized will become taxpayers and not tax consumers, just as many of those before them have done. In fact, Forbes reported encouraging news about second generation immigrant families. The difficulty is finding the data to support those claims on a wide scale – not because success stories don’t exist but because they are rarely documented.
Senator Ten Kennedy (D – Massachusetts) has said that if immigrants “work hard and play by the rules and work in very tough and menial jobs, they may have an opportunity to be a part of the American dream.” After all, America was founded on that very basis. But when it affects current American fiscal policy, we’re a little less likely to embrace that idea.
I want to know what you think: are American tax dollars a good investment in our future in a bill such as this? It is, after all, your money.
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