The IRS Volunteer Income Tax Assistance (VITA) and Tax Counseling for the Elderly (TCE) program is involved in ongoing partnerships with numerous public and private entities that provide free tax assistance to over three million low-income taxpayers.
The public and private entities that participate in the training include civic organizations, colleges/universities, retired professionals groups, religious organizations, United Way, and corporations with a commitment to volunteerism.
The VITA/TCE program provides training, certification, and other support for partners and volunteers.
Link & Learn Taxes was developed to support the IRS with its training needs. A five-day instructor-led training program was converted into an 80-hour interactive, web-based training program. The training includes over 4,000 web pages of tax topics, tax law narratives, examples, exercises, case studies, interview simulations, audio, and comprehensive tax exercises. The training connects learners with interactive forms, publications, and other job aids.
In addition to Link & Learn Taxes, a companion instructor-led training course, Process Based Training, was developed. Both courses are aligned and have been used to train new and returning volunteers since 2005.
IRS Link & Learn
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The e-learning courses, developed to run on more than 20 Internet browsers and operating systems specified by the IRS Public Portal Group, passed the extensive IRS.gov Site Design and User Interface Style Guidelines and Application Requirements tests-including site design and appearance, browser compatibility, Section 508 compliance, and performance testing. The course, which is updated every tax year, has been available on the IRS public portal, www.irs.gov, since June 1, 2004 and is also available on CD-ROM.
During peak periods, the Link & Learn Taxes web-based training has had as many as 24,000,000 pages viewed and more than 500,000 people have visited the site. In 2008, VITA/TCE volunteers, using the online Link & Learn Taxes curriculum, prepared over 3.5 million tax returns—an increase of 33 percent from the previous year.
In 2006, National Taxpayer Advocate Nina Olson appeared before Congress to discuss the regulation of tax preparers and testified about the effectiveness of the Link & Learn Taxes online training and certification program.
