Despite a challenging year, the Clinton Volunteer Income Tax Assistance (VITA) program has announced another successful year in which it was able to help 200 people file their taxes for free.

The VITA program allows for any Clinton citizen who makes below $80,000 to receive free tax prep work. Lynn Hidek, one of the bookers for the event, explained that typically what happens is each January people begin signing up for a slot and then they come to the library at the designated time to meet in person with a tax professional between February and April.

“This year we had to do things different because of COVID,” Hidek said.

Len Fried, the site director for the Clinton program, began trying to figure out how to make the program a reality in the summer of 2020 and a new method was designed with the permission of the IRS.

The new plan required people to drop off the necessarily documents at the library, where they could be collected by one of the four tax professionals filling out the forms. The documents were then taken out of the library, filled out, and returned to the library for the people to look over one more time. After that the forms were then re-collected and electronically filed.

“It was a lot of work and very cumbersome,” Fried admitted.

Fried said that usually the program services about 350 people in a year, but given all the difficulty COVID has caused the 200 people they were able to serve was quite the accomplishment.

“It’s a very good feeling, it’s a great service,” Fried said.

“We’re so glad that we can do this and help, it’s such a big help to the people who use it,” Hidek said, noting that many of the users can be confused by the forms that are needed.

Both Hidek and Fried were very complimentary of the Henry Carter Hull library for helping facilitate the VITA program this year.

“The library was so helpful this year in helping supervise, especially the two reference librarians Cathleen Cole and Kathleen Cartwright,” Hidek said.

Fried said he hopes for the program to be back in person next year, a prospect Hidek agreed with.

“It’s incredible, but for with all the people we served it’s heartbreaking that there’s more we just couldn’t see that we usually do who rely on this. Hopefully we can be in person again next year and get to everyone,” said Hidek.