The International Student and Scholar Services (ISSS) recently hosted a tax workshop for international students. Leah McSorley and Mickey Posey hosted the event in the International Center where McSorley talked about tax responsibilities and explained how taxes are used by the government. The agenda of the meeting was to learn tax responsibilities and how to use Sprintax, a website that international students and other immigrants use to do their taxes.

McSorley started the workshop by letting the students know that every international student needs to file their taxes. While it is a common misconception that only the people who have earned money in the U.S. need to file taxes, McSorley corrected the misconception and let the students know that they must file their taxes even if they do not owe anything. Even the students who entered the U.S. on Dec. 31, 2023 need to file their taxes for the year.

McSorley then discussed all the documents that students would need to file their taxes including passports, W2 forms, I20, I94, and tax return documents. She also explained where students could find all the forms they would need to file their taxes. She kept the workshop engaging by offering candies to people who got the answers to her questions right. She then moved on to talk about Sprintax.

“Sprintax is your best friend,” McSorley explained. “If there is any question you need to ask me, I will probably ask you to work with Sprintax unless you are asking me how to use Sprintax.”

McSorley explained how the International Students and Scholar Services cannot legally give students individualized advice for their taxes. Giving tax advice requires a certification that the ISSS does not have. Taxes are already confusing and individualized. The situation becomes even more diverse when people from different countries are doing their taxes depending on the relationship between their home country and the U.S. Sprintax considers all the factors before calculating taxes. Sprintax can also help amend old taxes if they were filed incorrectly.

The cost of using Sprintax is covered through international fees. Sprintax is available to all current international students for free. If any codes are left to redeem, those are provided to international alumni who ask for the codes.

The ISSS is also going to host different tax labs until tax day, which will be hosted by Gina Barker. The tax labs are more personalized where Barker would help students with the questions that they have about documents or Sprintax.

The workshop was also done on Zoom for the students who were unable to attend. The Zoom meeting was then posted for anyone who wanted to watch it. The tax labs with Barker are not available to the students who have not watched the Zoom recording or attended the workshop. Since a lot of information that will be needed for the labs was given by McSorley in the tax workshop, the ISSS decided that students must watch the workshop first.