Some Immigrants Desperate for Help

By Mary Beth Sheridan
Washington Post Staff Writer

The clock was ticking toward April 15, and Luis Angel was panicking. The Salvadoran bartender still hadn't gotten a W-2 form from a restaurant where he worked last year, and he wasn't sure what to do.

"Nobody wanted to help me," he said yesterday, explaining that the restaurant had gone out of business.

After asking around, Angel was referred to a free Spanish-language tax clinic at CentroNia, a service agency in the District's Columbia Heights neighborhood. At 2 p.m. yesterday, he was filling out a form for a tax counselor, relieved to find assistance.

"I was worried. I've never failed to pay [taxes]," said Angel, 26, of Lanham, who came from El Salvador six years ago.

If tax time brings many Americans an annual wave of frustration, it is perhaps especially stressful for low-income immigrants. They are hardly alone, of course, in finding tax forms baffling. But many immigrants are unfamiliar with the U.S. legal system. Some receive bad advice from cheap, poorly trained tax preparers, immigrant advocates say. And some have employers who send their W-2 pay forms late -- or not at all.

Taxes "scare Americans. You can understand why someone new would be overwhelmed," said Patricia Risinger, manager of Tess Community Service Center, a Montgomery County service agency that has run a tax assistance clinic in recent months for low-income residents, including many immigrants.

Several groups in the Washington area offered tax preparation aid this year in a variety of languages, from Spanish to Cantonese. The clinics provided free or low-cost service and often enabled immigrants to receive benefits they were unaware of, advocates say. In particular, numerous immigrants qualify for the earned-income tax credit, a special break for the working poor that can result in a significant refund.

"We have found cases who had never applied for that . . . when they found out [they qualified], they were so happy, they cried," said Thanh Nguyen, director of Boat People SOS, which provided tax assistance to Vietnamese immigrants in the Virginia and Maryland suburbs.

While immigrants were still lining up to get help yesterday, many groups offering assistance said they weren't overwhelmed. Many immigrants had filed early, expecting they would receive a refund, they said.

"The later they come, the more they owe," Risinger said.

The late arrivals also included problem cases -- such as immigrants who had taken their tax forms to low-cost preparers and received dubious advice.

Enrique Torrijo, who oversees the tax clinic at CentroNia, said immigrants are sometimes scammed by such preparers. In other cases, immigrants seek out people who will help them inflate their refunds, unaware of the consequences, he said.

Torrijo recalled looking at the tax returns of a single man who had sought to boost his refund one year by falsely claiming that he had a wife and daughter. "The next year he had two sons -- no wife, no daughter," he said. "Obviously we could not do that here."

But those who assist immigrants say many are eager to pay their taxes -- even those working here illegally. They know that if they cheat, they could jeopardize any chance they may have to become U.S. citizens, the program directors say.

Some immigrants pay dearly. Illegal immigrants who do not have Social Security numbers often file tax returns by getting a tax identification number from the U.S. Treasury Department. They do not qualify for many tax benefits and often owe money.

In other cases, immigrant laborers are considered private contractors and must come up with their entire Social Security payment, instead of having their employer pay half.

Angel, the bartender who was seeking help at CentroNia, is working legally, thanks to a benefit called Temporary Protected Status, or TPS, provided to many Salvadorans. But he has owed taxes most years, he said.

He feels the tax hit, since he earns only $18,000 a year, he said. But he shrugged it off.

"I think it's part of being honest," he said.

Another immigrant at the tax clinic, Celaida Mesa, 51, was in a hopeful mood. The Dominican housekeeper said she was supposed to get a refund for her 2003 taxes -- but it had not arrived.

She suspected that the problem was due to her moving to a new apartment in Columbia Heights last year.

Because her English is limited, however, she didn't feel she could approach the government herself. To get her taxes done last year, she had to corral a bilingual friend to accompany her to the tax preparer.

This year, she discovered CentroNia, formerly known as the Calvary Bilingual Multicultural Learning Center. Yesterday, she brought the tax clinic the problem of the 2003 refund. She chatted animatedly with a professional at the center, using the informal Spanish word for you -- tu.

As the professional worked the phones and wrote a letter for her, Mesa said she felt relief at breaking through the communication barrier.

"It's better tu-to-tu," Mesa said.

© 2005