By: Andriy Ostapyuk
According to an article by Caitlin Petre and published by Newsweek in 2006 friends of Petre that were graduates of Wesleyan, Barnard, Stanford and Yale that won academic awards and kept GPA of 3.9 were unable to fill out basic tax form and didn’t know what a Roth IRA is.
It is important for college students to understand how taxation works in this country. Graduates of colleges today have loans, and many do not understand the process or how you might qualify for a refund.
For students to become more familiar with process of taxation Passaic County Community College held a special workshop which discusses different topics associated with taxation. The workshop was held by Professor Ed Pagan on November 8, 2018 at 1:15 pm who lectures on finance and accounting at PCCC, where he explained the importance of knowing how to do a tax return on your own. People usually go to an accountant where they pay to have their tax return done for them.
Prof. Pagan started with handing out a few tax forms like W-2 form, 1099-INT form and 1098-E form which were related to one person named Lucy Walker, which students had to learn and compare to their own financial situation.
Lucy Walker is a college graduate so she entered that adult life, she is working and paying student loans and students at the workshop had to learn all information about her from forms and handouts so they would be able to prepare her federal and NJ personal income tax returns.
This process helped students to become more familiar with filling out income tax return forms.
Prof. Pagan added, “I believe that one workshop isn’t really enough for students to remember and understand the subject matter that’s why I chose to make two workshops where second one will be much more complicated than the first one.”
This workshop was also sponsored by the Business Leadership Club (BLC) and club members came there to help students follow all the process correctly and follow all the steps. At the end all students gave positive reviews saying the workshop was helpful for them and hope the second workshop will be even better.