By Blake Deshazo

The Selma Times-Journal

Students at Wallace Community College Selma are teaming up with Impact Alabama to help people save money. SaveFirst is a program that offers free tax preparation services for families that make less than $52,000 a year with children or $20,000 a year without children.

“[SaveFirst] is aimed at undercutting the predatory tax industry,” said Amanda Sanderson, a regional coordinator. “A lot of people pay preparers a huge sum of money, usually an average of $300 to $500, to prepare a very simple return.”

The free service is being offered in the administration building on the WCCS campus through Saturday, Feb. 28. Taxpayers can have their returns prepared every Tuesday and Friday from 11 a.m. until 5 p.m. and every Saturday from 9 a.m. until 3 p.m.

“We do their taxes for free, and we e-file for them,” Sanderson said. “So instead of losing [money] they have got their full return and it is also prepared correctly and reviewed several times. They’re never going to have to worry about us making a fraudulent claim for them.”

Volunteers that attend Wallace will prepare returns for taxpayers, but before they were approved to prepare them, they received the proper training and certification.

“Our basic volunteers go through the basic level of the tax return, and if there are more advanced topics that they can’t cover, someone else will do the next portion, and then the whole return is quality reviewed by someone else who is an advanced preparer.”

The program’s mission, Sanderson said, is to provide people with quality service that can properly file tax returns.

“We ensure that [taxpayers] never have something on their returns that are not valid,” Sanderson said. “We are saving them money, and we are also giving them a high quality, very diligently prepared return.”

The SaveFirst program has been around for nine years, but this is the first time the service has been offered in Selma. The joy people feel, Sanderson said, when taxpayers see their returns, is one of the most rewarding parts of the job.

“When [people] come in they are very nervous, but by the end we have gone through it together, and they have seen everything that I’ve done,” Sanderson said.

“They’re seeing the whole process, and by the end they get to see the number that is most likely going to be what they are going to get for their return. They’re just very happy and very pleased that it is over.”

SaveFirst accepts walk-in clients, but encourages people to call 1-888-99-TAX-AL to make an appointment.