Although it is perhaps the least exciting holiday to think about, Tax Day is an annual occurrence that should matter to college students more and more as we take on higher-paying jobs and look to enter the professional workforce for the first time. That date, anticipated by few and dreaded by many, fell on April 18th this year. 

For anyone who has not yet had the pleasure of celebrating, Tax Day refers to the deadline to file tax returns or to file for extensions to the IRS each year. Getting together the many documents, bills and paychecks necessary to file returns proves to be a headache, even for the most seasoned of the taxable population. The task is even more daunting for those who are less financially literate, with potentially serious consequences for mistakes. 

Of course, this confusion may apply to many students or young professionals. It is an age-old story that high schools and even universities do not do enough to educate their students about “real life skills,” like filing and understanding taxes. 

Students here at Villanova feel this stress acutely. 

“I feel like filing tax returns and other financial skills were something I always just assumed I would know when I was older,” junior Carly McNulty said. “But there’s never really been a resource to help me learn. It honestly stresses me out to think about having to deal with it all in the years ahead.”

Indeed, the process is daunting and seems incredibly overwhelming to the inexperienced tax-filer. It can feel like drowning in an alphabet soup of forms and documents –  the W-2, the W-4, the 1099-a and on and on. 

And if it seems mind-boggling to the likes of you and me, imagine the situation in the shoes of someone facing more extenuating circumstances. Think, for example, about refugee clients of the Philadelphia-based refugee non-profit HIAS Pennsylvania. As an intern at HIAS, it was eye-opening to realize how much more difficult language and cultural barriers make this process (along with many others). 

Thankfully in that case, Campaign for Working Families (CWF), another Philadelphia non-profit organization, stepped in to offer free tax preparation and filing services to HIAS clients this year. This support, involving language interpretation and help to understand the process more generally, made a world of difference for the refugees that partook in the tax assistance event. 

Assistance programs, events or workshops are not necessarily uncommon, but finding them does require proactive searching. In fact, some of these services exist here on campus.

For example, the Villanova Law School offers a federal tax clinic, in which law students work with low-income individuals and families who would not otherwise understand the bureaucratic and confusing system. Additionally and similarly, the Tax Law Society on campus offers the VITA (Volunteer Income Tax Assistance) program, which allows student volunteers to learn tax filing basics and then volunteer to help members of the fixed-income population in the Philadelphia area file their own taxes. 

These programs are valuable and important to help those in our area who do not have the resources or support to effectively handle the tax filing process on their own, but it still does leave the question of where students themselves can go for help. 

Of course, volunteering for the tax clinic as a law student or for VITA would help build tax skills, but not all students who need help have the ability to make the time commitment to a full-fledged volunteer obligation. 

To help bridge that gap for students, VITA actually began offering assistance recently to faculty, staff and students along with members of the community that they had historically already served. This past tax season, for example, they offered assistance for those needing tax help on campus on March 19th. 

It is helpful that CWF, the federal tax clinic, VITA and other valuable organizations offer these important services, but the fact that they are so necessary to such a massive part of the population is indicative of a greater systemic problem. 

The tax system should be less cripplingly bureaucratic and complicated, and filing taxes (including how the process works and what purpose it serves) should be a mandatory part of high school curricula. 

As something that will affect every American adult with a job, which ideally would ideally be every high schooler in the future, this is an important skill that would serve young Americans well to understand. 

However, systemic change takes time and cannot be guaranteed. In the meantime, it is vital that we as students, and other Americans, take initiative to find the helpful resources that are out there.