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This is a blog by Lazlo Beh, an attorney at the Pennsylvania Farmworker Project. Read more to learn about the process of filing taxes in the United States. The deadline to file taxes is April 18, 2016!

The Pennsylvania Farmworker Project provides free legal assistance to farmworkers in the state of Pennsylvania who can’t afford an attorney.  We normally focus on problems that farmworkers are having on the job, but we recently put together a tax poster because we could see that farmworkers, including workers with H-2A visas, had questions about taxes in the United States.  And they didn’t just have questions, they had a lot of problems, too. You can scroll to the bottom of this article to see the poster.

We hope that this poster will give farmworkers at least a basic understanding of the tax system.  Taxes in the United States can be really complicated, and most U.S. citizens – no matter what they do for work or how much they earn – get someone to help them do their taxes.   But it can be really hard for farmworkers to find someone to help them, and sometimes the people they find don’t do the taxes correctly and the workers end up paying or owing money that they didn’t need to pay.

The IRS (the government agency that collects taxes) helps organize groups of volunteers, called VITAs, to offer tax preparation for people who don’t make too much money.  You can try to find the nearest VITA to you by calling the IRS at 1-800-906-9887, by going online.

But for many farmworkers living without transportation on farms in rural areas of the U.S., there won’t be a VITA nearby. And not all VITAs speak Spanish or do taxes for all farmworkers. So farmworkers who want to get their taxes done will often times end up having to pay someone.  And, unfortunately, the people they pay sometimes don’t know how to do taxes for immigrants, including H-2A workers, with families in Mexico or other countries. 

What’s even worse is that sometimes the tax preparers lie and cheat to get more money for themselves, either directly from the immigrant or from the IRS by claiming false refunds and then taking some or all of the money.  We hope this poster will also help farmworkers understand some of the basic rules of taxes so they can try to avoid problems with tax preparers.

Here are some of the most important points about taxes for H-2A workers:

• H-2A workers are required to pay income taxes if they earn enough, but that depends on their marital status and who they are supporting by sending money back home. 
• If you are an H-2A worker, then it is your choice whether or not your employer can deduct income tax from your pay each week. If you choose to have taxes taken out of your pay, then you might be able to get some or all of that money back by filing a tax return the next year and claiming a refund.  If you choose not to have taxes taken out of each pay, then you may have a legal obligation to file a tax return next year and you may owe taxes.  If you aren’t going to earn enough to owe taxes, it doesn’t make any sense to have taxes taken out of your pay.
• H-2A workers do not have to pay Social Security and Medicare tax, which all other farmworkers do have to pay and which is automatically taken out of their pay.  Most employers know this, but not all. 
• H-2A workers, and other immigrant workers, are allowed to claim their wives (if they are legally married) and file as Married even if their wives are living in Mexico or another country.  This can take some work, because the process to get an Individual Tax Identification Numbers (ITIN) for a spouse living in Mexico isn’t always easy.  And it can be even harder to get an ITIN for a child living in Mexico, but the IRS allows it to be done. Sometimes tax preparers say that the IRS charges for an ITIN, or to file other tax forms, but that isn’t true.  That is just the tax preparer trying to get more money from you.
• We’ve seen many cases where tax preparers think that H-2A workers have to file as single, or that they can’t claim the family members they are supporting in Mexico, or that they have to file as “non-residents”.  “Non-residents” have to pay more taxes.  A “resident” for tax purposes is different than a “resident” for immigration purposes.  Just because you have an H-2A visa doesn’t mean you are a “non-resident”.  If you work for more than 6 months in the U.S., even if you don’t have any immigration permission at all, the IRS considers you to be a “resident” for that year.  In some cases, if you have worked multiple years with an H-2A visa, even if you are in the U.S. for less than 6 months you can still qualify as a “resident”. 
• Filing as married and claiming children or other dependents reduces the amount of income that you have to pay tax on.  In many cases it will reduce the amount of income that can be taxed all the way to nothing, and you won’t owe any tax.  But it is important to understand the rules about what children or other dependents can be claimed.  We say a little bit more about this in the poster.  Lots of times people, either accidentally or on purpose, claim people on their taxes who they are not supposed to.  If the IRS finds out about this, which they often do, the person who does it may end up owing money to the IRS.
• Finally, if you do owe money to the IRS but you can’t afford to pay it, there are sometimes things that can be done to help resolve the situation, or at least make it less financially burdensome.

We hope that this poster can answer some of the questions you may have about taxes in the U.S. If you have questions or comments about the poster, or if there are other questions about the tax system that you would like us to write more about on Contratados, please let us know! 

If you have questions or need help with your taxes, visit the IRS website or send an email to [email protected].

© The Center for Urban Pedagogy (CUP), 2016