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205 Tax-time Debt Repayment Education: A Pilot Field Experiment with IRS-VITA Clients
Key Words
field experiment, tax-time intervention, debt repayment education, tax refund, IRS-VITA
Short Description
This pilot study is part of an ongoing study exploring whether delivering debt-repayment education at tax-time can improve debt-management behaviors among low- to moderate-income (LMI) households who are IRS-VITA clients in central Arkansas. Limited work has been conducted focusing on tax-time debt-repayment interventions. For many LMI households, deciding how to best allocate their tax refund is an important annual financial decision. This study explores whether tax-time financial education, focused specifically on debt-repayment and the use of a repayment strategy, can serve as an effective tool to help improve financial behaviors. An ongoing framed field experiment is being conducted with LMI clients utilizing IRS-VITA services. Clients anticipating receiving a refund are randomized at the household level when they start the filing process, to either receive a debt repayment educational intervention (treatment), or not (control). This debt-repayment educational intervention utilizes materials adapted from the CFPB’s Your Money, Your Goals Toolkit. Three months after filing their return, 54% of clients who received the intervention used all or part of their refund towards paying down debt, compared to 30.8% of clients in the control group. Although preliminary results, this initial 23.2% difference between groups warrants further data collection during the upcoming 2022 tax season.