AARP TAX AIDE – Free Tax Help
Call for an appointment: 717-584-4886
MISSION
This is an First Church signature mission that has been in continuous operation since tax year 2007 with a mission to provide Free Tax help. Our volunteers prepare tax returns for local people in Lancaster City and the surrounding area at no charge. This tax service is equipped to file electronically for Federal and State returns, and at the same time, prepare paper returns for the Lancaster County Tax Collection Bureau (LCTCB). We also provide either property tax rebate or rent rebate preparation for low income taxpayers who qualify. The wireless internet infrastructure at First Church is critical to the success of this mission.
SCOPE
We serve low to middle income taxpayers with special emphasis on retirees and the elderly. The scope of the returns we can prepare is defined by the IRS and is quite detailed. We rarely have persons who are out of scope and denied service. Every tax return is mandated to have a quality review by a Team Leader before being electronically filed. The average gross income of our clients at First Church was $19,770. We secured more than $1,667,000 in refunds for 1443 clients who filed federal returns at the First Church tax office in 2018.
Our First Church site is an affiliate of the AARP Foundation and is the largest affiliated site in Eastern Pennsylvania in terms of the number of e-filed returns. Our process is 100 percent computer and network based, and runs in a Windows 10 environment running the Taxslayer application and Internet Explorer. We electronically file 99 percent of our tax returns to the IRS.