UW Law Tax Program Spends Week in Alaska Providing Tax Assistance to Residents

Many individuals in rural Alaskan villages face barriers to accessing professional tax services, making it difficult for them to submit their annual returns or resolve certain tax issues. To address this, the University of Washington School of Law Tax Program sends teams of law students to remote villages to assist the residents. The student teams are often the only tax services available in these villages, highlighting the importance of their work.

Before the students leave for the snow-packed villages of Alaska, they undergo extensive certification and training to ensure that they can effectively and appropriately support their clients. The team must also pack all necessary equipment, such as printers, laptops, sleeping bags and food.

Discover how UW Law’s tax students expand their legal education by venturing outside of the classroom and impacting the lives of others.

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So I had one taxpayer who was an older gentleman, he was retired. And he was like, just tell me how much I'm gonna owe. He's like, I know I owe every year. It's a couple thousand dollars. Just hit me with it. And after I finished doing all of his taxes and everything, and I was like, you only owe like a couple hundred dollars. It was like, this is the most like amazing news, I could have heard, I was so scared to come in here.

There's a lot of people that aren't able to get assistance with tax preparation because of transportation barriers and financial barriers. So, we go out there to help them with their tax preparation.

In most of the villages, we are the only professional tax services that they will have access to.

So, we have a lot of certification and training that we have to do to learn how to appropriately and effectively do people's taxes.

Once they complete the training, they will receive another training on travel to the villages and also on Native Alaskan cultures.

My team said there was no bad weather. But gear winter.

It was like packing for like a backpacking trip. Like you bring your food you bring your clothes, you bring your sleeping bag. Other time, we should pack like no more than 40 pounds per person.

The time came, we had our bags all packed. And then Monday morning, again, bright and early, we woke up, made our way to the smaller of the air strips, where they weighed all of our luggage, they weighed us. And they basically figured out what could and couldn't go.

That was my first time I went to Alaska, hopped on a bush plane and even snow machined.

Just seeing like that that was the plane that we were going to be flying on and that those were the mountains that we were going to be flying over. I was like that doesn't seem to add up.

I was saying like this is like a Narnia world.

So we stayed in Anvik for the first few nights and then we went to a small little village called Grayling. We have more time for exploring in Grayling because we got stuck due to the bad weather. So, we snow machined down into the village set up all of our tables and our printers and everything like that. And then we immediately started doing people's taxes.

We basically operate from early in the morning about eight, nine a.m. all the way to sometimes midnight, and even past midnight. Everyone kind of knows each other and sees each other. So, they were like if you need your taxes done, head down to the city office building.

Our efforts normally attained about 1.5 to about 2 million in refunds every year.

We worked with a grandmother that had two grandchildren that she had adopted and gave her the right result, which was not what she was expecting. was more than what she was expecting.

Oh, and I got to meet one of the elders in one of the villages, I did her taxes. And then she kept coming back the next couple of days.

Every village that we go, we will have stories like that. Taxpayers that get up and hug our students because they're so grateful.

I didn't have any idea of, kind of, the depth of what I would feel and what I would learn from it. I went into it being like yeah, that's something I'll probably enjoy.

I was the one who learned a lot from them. I can understand the tax law system better.

And better for us because we get to experience, you know, a different aspect of life that we don't experience down here in Seattle.

It made me feel so good. It made me want to go back next year to do it all again.