 Welcome. I'm Megan Dugan Adele. I'm the director of New America Chicago. We're so happy to have you with us today. Tax credits can be completely life-changing for struggling Americans working in low-wage jobs, a life-saving ring, if you will. They're a respite for penny-pinching families, and they can even be a boon for local businesses. We've talked to many families in Illinois and heard from other partners around the country talking to low-income families who have received tax credits. One mother in Chicago who works at a school and has two toddlers told us, and you can go to the next slide, this is like one of the best times of the year because everything that we worked hard for over the year is kind of getting ready to come back to us. Next time is that additional time you get to catch up on bills. Do a little bit more for yourself and your family. So it's a happy time for me personally. For preschool workers, grocery store workers, all the people in low-age jobs that we depend on every day, getting a refund check can keep them from drowning financially, give them a little bit of hope. Targeted really through tax credits like the earned income tax credit at the state and federal level and child tax credits at the state and federal level have been shown to be one of the largest and most effective anti-poverty initiatives in our country's history. But for most people we spoke with, it can be really hard to get their tax credits. The tax system is unbelievably complicated. It can be scary for people. They're afraid of making mistakes. It can be very confusing. People making simple mistakes or confusion about what to do keeps millions of people from getting the money that they're owed. Many of the people we spoke with had paid prepares make errors that cost them dearly or others got surprised tax bills when they really were making very little money. Our government gives billions of dollars back through tax credits each year, but the system really isn't designed for the millions of people who need the money the most. So people who work at our lowest paid jobs usually don't file taxes because they don't need to and really they shouldn't have to. When they do try to access needed tax credits, the system often doesn't work that well for them. So people may be working hard but not stable in one at one address or living in their cars, family members caring for dependent children, people without computers, people with government phones, people on disability are all people who face multiple barriers that make it difficult to do something that really could be very simple. Fortunately, we have everything we need to solve the problem. So today we'll be sharing evidence of what can work and specific steps states can take now to help more hardworking people get the tax credits they deserve. Now I'm going to turn it over to our host and moderator, Yana. Thank you, Megan. My name is Yana Kachoris. I'm the senior director of policy advocacy at the Chicago community trust. And I'm really pleased to serve as moderator for today's conversation. For those of us who don't know us, the trust is the community foundation for the Chicago region and we have made policy and systems change a key area of focus as we work to meet our strategic mention of closing the racial and ethnic wealth gap. And we're really proud to have supported and advocated alongside our nonprofit partners to see the expansion of the Illinois Earned Income Credit past this year in the last year's legislative session. And that we've also been able to advocate for the expansion of the Earned Income Tax Credit and Child Tax Credit at the federal level. These tax credits as Megan so ably and poignantly pointed out are key to addressing economic security and financial health for individuals and families, which is a necessary condition for building wealth. And the groups newly included in the state of Illinois Earned Income Credit will go a long way in increasing financial health for black and Latinx families who are disproportionately more likely to be financially insecure. We can't stop it passing legislation when making this kind of change. So implementation is a really key part of policy assistance change and it is why we've also been pleased to partner with New America and the team here in Chicago and DC to get this part right. Tax credits are only as good as the ability of people to readily access them. So without further ado, I'd like to introduce our panelists who will show us from experience in New York and Illinois how we can achieve greater reach and community level impact through these tax credits. We've already heard from Megan, who is the director of New America Chicago and focuses on how local communities and public policy work to improve equity and economic mobility. Next, we'll hear from Vanessa Ronhell and Tara McGinnis to share more about New America's expertise and efforts to expand the reach of tax credits. Vanessa is a senior program associate at New America Chicago where she supports efforts on reducing predatory lending tax credits and community policy design projects. Tara McGinnis is the founder and senior director of the new practice lab. Her work lies at the intersection of policy creation implementation and citizen and community voices. We'll then turn it over to Alberto Rodriguez Alvarez to talk about his experience working with the state of New York. He is senior program manager working with the public interest technology team at New America and has spent the last five years working directly in digital technology and policy from different angles. Following our discussion with Alberto, we will hear from Whitney elders and Jason pulling from the Illinois Department of Revenue. Whitney is a technical support supervisor with Illinois Department of Revenue and has been with the department for almost 10 years. He currently serves as the department's DEIA committee chair and is excited to see such dedication and progress to DEIA initiative. Jason is a 20 plus year employee at the Department of Revenue Illinois Department of Revenue. While most of his career has been spent as an auditor he has risen in the ranks to become the supervisor of the Federalist State Exchange Unit, where he has the privilege of leading the best people he has ever known. That's quite an endorsement. I ended with a discussion on recommendations from State Act for state action with Tara and Megan, and we want for this to be a dynamic conversation. So we'll be opening it up for Q&A throughout the conversation. So please have your questions ready and add them to the chat, and we will be sure to get them answered. So with that, I will turn it over to Vanessa and Tara to kick us off. Again, my name is Vanessa Rangel and I'm a senior program associate with New America Chicago. For those of you unfamiliar with our work, New America Chicago is a local hub of New America and we're based at the Chicago Community Trust. New America is a think and do tank dedicated to renewing the promise of America by continuing the quest to realize our nation's highest ideals. So we at New America Chicago, we provide original policy research and advocacy grounded in the lived experiences of community members who are normally left out of the process. Our goal is to gather community leaders, thought leaders and policymakers committed to finding practical solutions together to tackle community challenges, particularly those related to economic and racial inequity. So part of being embedded in the community, we at New America Chicago collaborate with different coalitions around the city, including one run by our partner economic security for Illinois and they get my payment Illinois coalition just to name a few. Additionally, one of our newest initiatives civic space is an experimental concept for policy design, which incorporates our unique policy experience and people centered approach to create change. Rather than using a top down approach to policy design, we focus on building better feedback groups between residents and policy makers to generate policies and tools from the ground up using human centered design thinking. We're also focusing on the user experience. You can learn more about our work at our website at www.newamerica.org forward slash Chicago. I'll go ahead and let Tara introduce a new practice lab. If you could do next slide. Thank you. I'm time again as I'm so happy to be here with all of you. I love the coalition of the people who love to make sure people get their taxes and what they've earned and it's incredible to be online with the folks from Illinois and I can't wait to hear you say something to your toe about New York. The evidence is in about what works. I run something called the new practice lab at New America, where a national lab focused on family economic security or goals to help the government earn back trust by making the safety net. It's a really simple and simpler and easier to use. We work on things like smoothing the experience of receiving your EITC or CTC, or, you know, as is average in many states, families with young children face somewhere between seven and 14 accessible programs for kids under five, just making that administrative burden lower making it actually easier to get your kid into preschool or to receive your paid leave in spite of immense forms. Our theory is that the government was sort of built for a different time and for not for those families that are using it today. And you can see this you heard a number of important stats about the inaccessibility of some tax credits but on the flip side, you know, with the expansion for a while the CTC a very low income family with three children could have easily received last year $1,000 from the IRS more than six times than what they would have gotten in previous years. I think we all know that nearly one in five of those eligible for the ETC often do not this is the earned income tax credit federally do not access cash that we know people need so desperately at the new practice lab. So we're going to focus on this inaccessibility challenge. How do you make sure that six million families who could receive the CTC get it. Every year you have almost 13 million families who are unable to access food assistance. There's immense incredible work done by the IRS and state tax partners to make for low income filers taxing paying taxes less confusing, but 95% of those low income folks do not use what is eligible to them so just to kind of set up both the new practice lab and the problem we're tackling here through the amazing work of folks on the call. Those are a few kind of the North Star the challenge we're facing. There's been really a shift in where we deliver public benefits and you know people think about Social Security which delivers $16 billion a year, but actually the IRS right after Social Security is the second biggest payer of federal tax benefits with over the year, including kind of COVID tax credits $700 billion in public benefits. So I'm really thinking about IRS and state based tax agencies as both a role in in auditing and making sure we're being accountable to what is in the public pocket, but also as a benefits administrator as the responsibilities of tax delivery have grown over time. We can hear at the new practice lab are happy partners to all of you but maybe I'll kick it back and we can hear from Albert tell a bit more about what we do when we work on the ground with partners. Thank you, Sarah. I'm so happy to talk a little bit about the work that we did with the New York State Department of Tax and Taxation and Finance. If you can put the next slide. I'm going to spend a couple of minutes talking about this project, which was basically a discovery sprint and a discovery sprint is as we as you've heard by now a human centered design methodology that lets us understand a huge problem in small and and manageable increments. We try to understand all the players and all the stakeholders and the partner and every step of the process of a big service or break government project or even an organization. And what we did was partner again with the New York State Department of Tax and Finance to try to solve the problem that we've been talking about. Specifically, we knew that despite the benefits of the EC, the earning credit 18.6% of the people that were eligible in New York did not claim the credit. So we started this sprint with their team to try to understand the residence experience and how and where were the problems and the pain points to get that credit in their hands. And while we did the process, we actually found out that if we looked at the friends and would look at the most difficult cases, we could actually understand more. So we end up doing some research on one piece of information, which is the DTF 973.5, which is an inquiry letter. This inquiry letter, it was important for us and it was interesting for us because it requests additional information from taxpayers after their initial filing, but for those that didn't complete the refund. So the participants there, they wanted to do the process, but by some problem or by some thing that we didn't understand and that they didn't understand, they didn't finalize the process and ended up not getting the money. So by understanding that process, we thought that we would find really good actionable points and next steps. So next slide. What we did was in the discovery sprint come up with a process to understand both the filers, but also the stakeholders within the tax department. And we also took a deep dive with community-based organizations to see what the relationship was with the claimers and what were the pain points and what were the information positions that were lacking. If we do a next slide. And this is kind of what we found. What we found is at the beginning, all of the users follow roughly the same path. They collect the documents, they decide how to file taxes and they prepare the tax documentation. And then it goes here. This graph tells you basically on emotion. The higher it is, the better the emotion. The lower it is, the is a negative emotion. So things went really well. They started to prepare the tax documents, they filed it and by the time that they finished the file, it was great. Everything was going according to plan. For the ones that didn't have at least one piece or one data point missing, it went all the way good and it's the green line and they get their tax fund and everything was fine. But for those that a little bit of information was missing, they got this letter. And when they got this letter, this was a four-page letter with 72 bullet points of all the possible information that they might not have given when they were filing. And what we found out is that that was not just a problem of not finalizing. It was actually a fear point. It caused the claimants who got this letter to believe that they were going to be audited. So we came all the way from having a relationship where they wanted to get their tax credit to a proposition that they would be in trouble. Next slide. So in this case, we found out that the purpose of the letter was unclear. We took the letter and we talked to several claimants. And they talked us through what feelings and what possible points we're having when they were reading the letter. And I just want to just quickly note one of the quotes there is that I'm reading two or three times and I'm still trying to figure out what it is that they want from me. And then I have to make a call because nobody's actually telling me what to do. So from that and from several analysis, we came up with two types of recommendations. One is specifically on the communications. If you change this letter in a significant way, you will get a better result given what we found. Next slide. So we came up with five communication recommendations. And this is, even though it's there just for this letter, they could apply to any kind of communications and letters sent from tax departments. And they sound easy, but they have a lot of things and a lot of powerful insights within them. First, state the purpose of the communications. Much of those letters did not have that piece. Use clear formatting. If they see three types of bullet points and a lot of information, it's certainly going to be not taken with the proper seriousness. The third one is to divide the recipients into key groups. We have the information. In this case, they had the information to parse and send the specific letters to specific people depending on the information that was missing. That logistically is a problem, but it would definitely create a better point because one letter fits all generally creates a lot of confusion and can lead to decreased readability. Finally, consolidated requests and not very extensive translated services for the population. Finally, we came up with overall recommendations on the next slide, which is basically just utilize the known information that they already have. We found out that most of the filers that we talked with, they had a really positive experience when filing and when using community based organizations, that's what CBO means in the slide. But when problems arose, there was no information on the websites that could support it. So those were the recommendations that also using, and this is one of the most important, there were a lot of forms that could be prefilled to a point. What the information from available state tax forms that you've previously seen such as age withholding and tax information for employers. So I'm on the next slide here. And we also recommended to update the website with those cases and to further support the available channels for tax preparers, specifically in their case with the Office of External Affairs. That was one of the key strengths when we talked with the filers and we talked with the stakeholders. They said that that was that was valuable help for filers. The programs and all CBOs were paramount for this sense. So as a summary for this, we found out that communications do matter and little changes to be more specific can really make a difference in how people understand and go through the government processes specifically at this kind of a credits. And you have to understand your process and you have to understand and talk to everyone that is involved. Little notice and for information can make a big change. Great. Thank you about though. I've heard that there may be possible issues with the Q&A function with the webinar. So if you refresh the page, Slido, I believe is how you pronounce that the Q&A feature should appear. So, in the meantime, I'll kick us off with some questions and thank you for the detailed. Overview of what you found in New York and I thought maybe you could start just a little bit telling us about how what you found fits with what other research tells us about how we can improve uptake amongst non-filers in particular. So the first thing is that everyone has a relationship with the government and in this case the relationship is based on the communications that you have with them. The better the communications that you have, the better that relationship is and the better trust it will have. And it's the little things, again, how a letter is worded and how it's structured that it makes it efficient and effective in what it wants to curtail. That is completely in what we've heard and not just in recent research but also in sociology research from 10 to 20 years ago. You do really need to take apart that kind of information. And the other thing is that one thing is what the users get from this information and sometimes that is not in line with what governments actually want to say through their information. So you have to go and put yourself in the user's space and in the user's view to try to understand their experience and in order to make it better. Sorry, I lost the mute button for a second. Thank you for that and I think one of the sort of as I reflect on as a recipient of information sometimes from government entities, whether it's around student loan information or what have you, it's like they have to put everything all into one document. And I think it is overwhelming. I think anybody who's trying to digest that information is going to be overwhelmed by it. And it's almost simple, just the simplest thing of saying communications is important and how you communicate that information. And as you say, this is not something that's necessarily new but not always something that government entities do super well. So I'm wondering what was the response to your recommendations in New York. Once you kind of went through these findings with them. So how have they adapted based based on that experience and I'm sorry, we can also open it up to other panelists to chime in as well. Of course, I'll actually let Tara, the head of not just this region for this. I mean, it was really striking in New York we had, we had offered the briefing on the qualitative work to a few of the leaders of the New York State Agency and they asked like can we bring people and there were dozens and dozens of state leaders who sat and just had question after question about what the taxpayer experience was because it's just an unusual level of hearing about how it goes when someone receives your form. So if we give one clear anecdote and this pulls right on your thread of like confusing letters 100% of people in our qualitative work thought they were being audited 100% of them were being asked for like one more piece of information in order to get your tax credit. And this was sort of so shocking to the folks who were were under, we're wondering why isn't anyone sending us back information. The same like 60 of her to correct me here. Like, if you needed more information on your business or confirmation of the number of children you had, or your income like every one of the questions that a person could get wrong was in the same letter. So moms were like why are they asking me about a business I don't even have a business what is someone impersonating me. And so, so, like, that is a very regular government practice we see all the time where any of the things that were wrong go out in one single letter which is just immensely confusing you would have a fundamentally different thing that's like, please confirm you have three kids, and then you'll get your tax credit. Everyone thought like it was just the, the, the combination of every question that could be wrong being in one letter, and the tone of the tone that made people feel like they're being investigated when in fact it was a government letter helping them to get their benefit. And so, those were two and really hearing watching the briefing of dozens of tax officials, take in the words of people who'd experienced their, their official form was really really striking and I think made a move. We have and if folks are interested we've designed a new letter the before and after and I think I'm sure the New York team would be happy to have that kind of model letter with anyone so that's one piece that perhaps an artifact we could share. Yeah, that that would be great I mean it sounds like they they really internalized and kind of taken the recommendations forward. And I think the pushback where they said, Well, we can't do that. Or, you know, that's that's not how we do things or you know how did you navigate some of that inertia that that that may exist. That's a great question and Alberto here just signals to me if you if you want to pop in. I think the two neat things happened one is that the New York State Commissioner at the time, whose name Mike Schmidt really led an inquiry from the top that said like we are really interested to learn what the experience is, especially a diverse New Yorkers. You know there's a difference their barriers here. And so kind of, I think one of the reasons we had such large law, you know, uptake and listening sessions and questions that went on and on, were from the very top of a government agency someone said like we can do better and so let's all hear from the folks we serve. So just put that's a one takeaway. I actually went on to work in the IRS on the delivery of CTC so I think actually some of the lessons went to a different tax entity, almost immediately at days after we concluded this body of research. There was a process for a new commissioner. So I think sometimes the learning of one agency in one instance can transfer to another agency because of the way humans move around Alberto kick it over to you. I'll just parallel on a little bit about that. But also a good thing about the process is that, in this case, New York was really open, not just to hear our recommendations but actually on the whole process. We got to talk to internal stakeholders within the New York State Department of Tax and Finance. They facilitated conversations with both external organizations and community based organizations that they've worked with normally. And they also helped us reach interactive EIC claimants and in the most secure way. So it's not just about the research that you do and the results but it's also about opening the process to try to learn what can be better and quite it's going wrong in a particular sense. And it also talks a little bit about how Discovery Sprints work, right? Whenever you go into a Discovery Sprint you have to understand that the main thing that you need to do is lay all the cards on the table and try to find out how they connect to each other and what are the problems in those connections. That a Sprint will normally start with a kickoff where you will have an opportunity to talk to people inside of the government agency that you're working with and set up an agenda for the next four to six weeks and that's why it's called the Sprint. This is something quick and conversations lead to new conversations, lead to new connections, lead to new data analysis and you get to uncover it all as you go along. And the other, and this is why I love the work as well, the only cool thing about this is that you get to talk to all of the people in the process. And it is not just the higher ups, it's not just the directors and who's leading the work but also who's actually there and just a boots on the ground who's actually talking to, in this case, to claimants. So, you have to understand it from every angle and try to come up with what are the constraints and the main problems and the main pain points, and come up with a possible solution. Now, the discovery Sprint, the other keyword on that is the discovery, you will unpack the problems that sometimes are not visible for neither the claimants and definitely not for the government agency that you're working with, in this case the New York State Department of Tax and Finance. It was easy for them to say, well, we're actually giving all of the information possible through this letter, but the insight was, sometimes a lot of information is actually not a good thing. Sometimes less information is actually better. Yeah, the less is more principle. I like to think about it. So, thank you for that and I guess, you know, since we have folks from, you know, all over the country on the on the call today. I'm curious what advice would you have for other states who might want to use this type of sprint or process at their state, what what advice would you have for pursuing something like this. Let Tara continue but I'll just give a one piece this work, even though they're, it's sort of new in the government space. Governments have been doing this from since since the beginning, talking to the constituents is something that that is normal in government sense but sometimes bureaucracy does not let you. So the first thing that I would say is, just ask yourself, how, how can I really engage with my user with my citizen with my constituents. And if something comes up, if it's a, if it's a rule or an unspoken rule or something that impedes you with it, just ask yourself if it's really something that can't be really ignored. We sometimes get when we're doing this friends we we sometimes get. Well, it's actually illegal to go on and talk about this with the public where it is not this is just a common practice but there's no law against it. So, TLPR, try to talk to the users as much as you can and as directly as you can. So I would like to emphasize what underscore it Albert said. And really, first, if you're alone in this and you're wondering where to start, then there's many colleagues on the call who I think I'm happy to help there's no reason not to repeat precisely what the team in Illinois did that comes are remarkable like there's some models you don't have to be the first team that goes. But if you're really, you know, government agency or have a government partner at the new practice lab we run three to four. It's just on getting low income families their benefits so if you give us a call we'd be happy to take a look at your form at a lighter weight level if you're wondering where to start thinking. It's so often that the experience of a taxpayer or beneficiary is a welcome mat that you don't think of and I can say this as a former fed that your welcome mat is your form or maybe your call center, or maybe, you know the the letter you send out once a month to a million people that as an agency head like maybe you don't get it line at it but thinking about getting your team around to say what is our what is the biggest hit letter form. What's, you know 100,000 people 300,000 people a million people read, and like let's take a hard look at that do we do we think it's easy to use ourselves how we read it. In English, is it in, you know, government wish, and just like really thinking about what is the high traffic. One, you know, page thing that causes people pain that may just be perfunctory and no one looked at since 1973 and taken a hard look at that and if you ever wanted to review that we'd be a partner but really what is your welcome mat often it's not what you think, and what you're spending a lot of time as an agency leader working policy for. Thank you and you know I know there's been a lot of conversation to about through using technology and we're talking about the sort of the analog that is a letter. I wonder if any of those insights came into your conversations with folks in New York about how to deliver the kind of message and receive information back in ways that maybe maybe meet us where we are today with computers in our hands. I think the data analysis of just how many people never got the letter, how many, how often this particularly the low income population changes addresses so back to like where the, you know thing one is go, go ask yourself what your welcome mat is thing to is following the food chain of, you know this, this particular letter we focused in on, think was like a 40% fall off. It was a huge blocker for people getting their EIC. So what inside your system, is it an email is it a letter that then, you know you lose half of the folks you're trying to work so really the second piece is just go look at choke points what is the question everyone gets hung up on. There were 60. But sometimes there's one that gets everyone stuck and sends everyone to further review so second piece would be on the on the technology side. It isn't high technology but it's a little bit of data systems work to say like what are the fall off points and I think that would be the second piece. The only thing that I would ask is also, I mean, even though we were looking at just one letter that letter had a huge impact. Why because because of the concept of fear, the concept of they thought that they were being audited that is that did not just impact this tax filing season, but also others, because if you they are that they started to put point of position where where they were, you know fearful of continuing the relationship with the government. Great, thank you. I know there's there's a lot more we could could dig into there. And, you know, folks online, please do add any more questions that you might have will will again take them as they come but I think we're going to pivot now to the Illinois initiative and the presentation from Whitney and Jason, so I will turn it over to both of you. Yeah. Well we want to give you money. That's what we determined we're going to do here with the Illinois EIC project at the Illinois Department of Revenue. If we can roll to the next slide. I'll give you a view of our little disclaimer. And we'll just roll right on past that. The Illinois Air and Income Tax Credit is a powerful tool available to low moderate income taxpayers, rewarding them for their hard work now here in Illinois, ours follows the federal as a percentage, but we know that thousands failed to claim the refund every year. Some of it due to structural inequalities some of it just a, you know, difficulty filling out the forms. What we determined is that we could use our existing processes and federal data to connect qualified non filing taxpayers with their credit. And we innovated, and a myriad of ways to overcome barriers, leverage technology, and basically make the project a success. I want to step you through some of those components here today. It's a little bit down in the weeds but I, there's very important parts here that made this go well for Illinois. So if we go to the next slide. All right, so we had four basic project components. We had to create a high performing team. We obviously had to do the work. We had to keep our team on track and we had to keep the goal in mind. Next slide please. So first thing, nice Lincoln quote here determined that the thing can and shall be done and then we shall find a way. It was clear from the start here in Illinois that it can and shall be. We just had to find the way. And it all started with executive direction with a clear directive from our governor the honorable JB Pritzker and guidance from the Illinois Department of President Harris, and from our chief of staff Jim Nicholson, we were able to assemble a highly engaged team, starting with a project manager with the elders on board did some subject matter experts, myself, and emphasized a full team approach. And I do mean full team. Every section of the department was involved, not as by standards but as active participants. And I'll give you an example. At the beginning of one meeting our publication management team was informed of a change needed to a letter, a process that at times can be lengthy and cumbersome. Here the meeting was not half over when all the attendees received an updated copy for approval. A full team approach engaged in participating made the success. Go to the next slide. Here in Illinois we framed the project. We started by setting ground floor rules that we wanted to make it as easy as possible for the taxpayer. Notably this included a pre-populated return to make it easy for them to respond. We identified risks, potential for error, labor costs and of course fraud, but we didn't allow these to be a bar to the success of the project. We did make testing the highest priority. It is the second biggest bottleneck that you can find in a project. The first being decisions, of course. My staff were the testers and I made sure that it was an absolute top priority. And that means as a lion supervisor being ready to redirect labor hours from other tasks. Timely testing allows programmers ample time to fix bugs. This project started testing in July and went into production in October. And while that may not mean much to most people, that is a lightning fast timeframe. Also, we had to be flexible. We knew that life happens. Who doesn't after the pandemic, right? Plates are full. A missed deadline was not the end of the world. We kept the focus on momentum and held each other as needed. We also watched out for scope creep. We knew that there could be enhancements along the way and enhancements almost always derail a project or get you down into the weeds. Instead of bogging down by adding extra items, we documented the potential improvements and put them in a section of our project charter called EIC 2.0 so that we could put them in the next year's project. This allowed for timely implementation while also recognizing potential future enhancements. And of course, good communication. Obvious but under-emphasized and more than just emails. Whitney Elders was invaluable as our project manager. She followed up with the various sections continuously, helping everyone get resources, answers, and tasks completed. And the point in this is good communication doesn't wait until a meeting. It has to occur outside the meeting to keep things flowing. And if we can go to the next slide, please. Always bear in mind that your own resolution to succeed is more important than any one other thing. You have to keep the team on track. In this case, we utilized a new process at the Department of Revenue. At the Department of Revenue, we alternated between weekly meetings of policy makers and programmers. This was used to make sure that we updated the decision makers, brought questions forward and concerns to the table, and we had decisions made at every meeting. At the same time, we were able to get the programmers together, along with the end users, and kind of hash out the details as we went along. We also used an on-screen agenda. This kept conversations on point. We were all able to see the notes and decisions clearly, reduced confusion across the board, and meeting participants can correct information live if it's noted incorrectly on the screen. We also documented the decisions. The early decisions kept the project moving forward, and I can't emphasize that enough. In 20 years of working in the Department of Revenue, this project was probably the best at making decisions. And it kept the project going. Too often, we get into these meetings and we talk to hear ourselves talk, and we don't make a decision. That didn't happen here, okay? It allowed for clear direction, and we knew that we could always reverse course. And a couple times during the project, we actually did. Go back and forth, back and forth, but that's okay. We also issued notes. The live agenda turns immediately into meeting notes that can be distributed after the meeting. It includes the conversation, decisions made, the next meeting, and of course, action items. And this is where Whitney was really helpful. She made sure that people were responsible for something at the end of every meeting and knew when it should be completed. And then, of course, she followed up in between the meetings to make sure it got done. We can go to the next slide, please. Okay. As always, keep the goal in mind. Okay, implementing a project is not the end goal, okay? You're not in it just to get the job done. The goal is to connect taxpayers with the earned income credit, and you have to frame everything that way. So what do we do? We establish reporting. Obviously, we want to know what the results are. We evaluate the project. Did we have an impact? And then we made improvements. And there is no system that cannot be improved upon. Okay, in this case, we took it forward into the second year, and we were actually able to reduce labor costs significantly, making the project even more viable for continuing. We have recently concluded our third year, and we'll be going into our fourth year, although the fourth year is a bit delayed because the federal government does have some problems getting with the extracts we need out right now. There are a few months behind. So we did have success. We mailed over 22,000 taxpayers, sent over 10,000 refunds, not a percentage of 48% in the first pilot project, over $5 million. The average refund was about $532. Interestingly enough, while it's not evident on top, and the focus here is on EIC, the fact is that a lot of the money that was being refunded was also excess withholding that people simply didn't access. So it's not just the credit itself. It's getting the taxpayers in connection with all of their money. It's important to step back and evaluate what went well always, what didn't, what can be improved. We did note that it was a success, if we do pat ourselves on the back. We did spend a significant amount of time on it. But that pays off in the future because it is time well invested and it can continue going on. So our project is ongoing. Some taxpayers responded after the response time had expired. Now we use an arbitrary 60 days to try to keep people engaged in responding. Truth is that they can apply for the refund all the way up to the statute of limitations. We made a little bit of a mistake. We took those returns off after the original response time expired and the process down and back has been labor intensive. Also means we can't tell you how many of them other than by hearsay that a lot of people actually did respond later. Some of them not until we sent the second year because they thought the first year was a scam. So we've had a lot of sort of residual success. Since so many of the low income taxpayers were unbanked, we'd like to find a way to offer refunds using debit cards, but there are some significant hurdles there. So right now we are issuing paper checks to people. Let's go to the next slide. While that went faster than I thought it would go. This is probably the most important slide to me. Our government rests in public opinion. Whoever can change public opinion can change the government. I want to take this moment really to thank Megan, Vanessa, Hiana, all of you. This project I know started with a flyer, which prompted a question and resulted in action. Please never underestimate the impact that you guys have. Because without the seed zone, we would not have brought this to fruition. And that's all I have. We have a contact page there. If you have any other information. More. Great. I apologize to her in advance for brutalizing her name. No worries. Thank you. And we do want to have a conversation with you all a little bit. I wonder if I could ask you, Jason, if you could say a little bit more about, I mean, those are very thorough in terms of like, you know, how you executed on this. And I don't think you could ever estimate underestimate how important it is to have a very clear set of expectations and processes in place to do this work. So I'm wondering if you had to be worked through to get to how to reach the filers that are folks who are eligible for the credits, but haven't yet claimed it. So I'm wondering if you could say a little bit more about who you targeted with your outreach and how you reached, what information you gave them to be able to know what they were eligible for with the pilot. Well, and that's very interesting point. What's overlooked in this whole process is that this was part of what we already did. We send out tax bills to people based on federal information. The only difference is we use that information here to identify people that had excess credits available to them. And then changed our process slightly so that instead of sending a bill, we sent them a return where they could sign it and send it back to get a refund. So the process, I think, can be very similar for any state. We all send bills. We all can utilize the federal information to identify and calculate the credits based upon our own unique laws. It's just a matter of doing it, really. So you had the will. You just had to figure out the process. I'm, I will be honest with you. It was the clear direction from up top. It was going to be done. And so we found the way to do it. Great. Whitney, just want to invite you to chime in if there's anything you'd like to add. And if not, I'll pass it over to Vanessa to talk a little bit more about sort of the impacts and some of the key findings from the work that New America did with the team. Sure. Thank you. Thank you. You know, I think some of the success really hinged on, on something that Alberto spoke about with his sprint is just identifying our, our mode of communication was a letter. And we wanted to make sure that it was easily understandable. And I think part of the success was it was, it was a letter that was very, it was a letter that was very, very easy to understand in words that they could understand. And then we also invited them to respond back with, with a picture of the return. They didn't even have to, you know, mail it back. And so we had an email address where people could, could respond back and that ease of being able to submit something back and the ability to understand it very clearly. And so that was part of the success. Our biggest hurdle was the fraud because it's not often that you have a government entity saying, Hey, we want to give you money. And so the public outreach of, of letting the community know that we are doing this program. I think. And word of mouth as people receive these checks and they tell, you know, their family members and friends that, you know, this is occurring. I think that will help our success moving forward. So those are the really two of the things that I noted that we didn't really expand upon. And I'm going to jump in here with me. I agree. And I kind of overlooked it. It ties in to the practice lab with New York. Years of experience sending letters to taxpayers and always there's an element of what kind of response are you going to get in this, we tried to make it very obvious that the only thing they needed to do is return the signature authorization page. To get the refund. And this had to be one of the best written letters ever because 98% of them just returned one single sheet of paper. Or a picture of it. So it's very important tailoring those letters to the audience to make it clear what they need to do. So back to you. Can I jump in and say, I don't know if people know what return rates are on any kind of letter, but this is not an average return rate. Like for, for even important government letters from clear government sources, this is like an extraordinary return rate. And I think it must have been, it must have been very clear. You know, funds are on the other side, the broader communications about it. But I want to put in context like this is as a person who doesn't know what return rate is. And I think it's really important for the state, state and federal has run pilots to get letters to people to have them access things. This is like. An epic. You know, success, like one in 10 is a great return rate. You know, this is really incredible. And part of that must be something's worth it on the other side and real clear communications around it, but that. You know, there seems to be no reason why 49 other states aren't familiar with average return rates. We're talking about an extraordinary outcome here that always landed. Yeah. And, and, you know, if I can just react because not someone who's been deep in the weeds on this, it is, you know, having the return mechanism be so simple and elegant as taking a picture of your signature on a form. That is, you know, that's groundbreaking. And I think it's really important for the state to understand that. Whitney, you look like you were coming off mute for a second. Did you want, do you want to add something? I did. I think another success element that we had was the, the freedom for people to come to the table. We invited everyone to the table, but then it was the freedom for them to share ideas. And think outside of the box. So one of the things that made our process work. And, and, and we, you know, you know, we, you know, we, you know, we had to make sure we're adding a return to generate a letter. And we did not want them to be negatively impacted. So it came from. The individual processing area. If we hadn't had them at the table, we might have gone a different direction on how we solved that problem. And, and it. which caused some reporting issues on our end and a little bit of a labor intensive approach to resolving it. But Jason, I believe you resolved that with the 2.0, right? Yes, yes, actually, we actually changed the 2.0. We determined that there was actually very little value added by doing the in-depth examination of what was sent back since they were all managing to provide what we wanted. The only thing we need to do is compare signature to the basically the name on the account. And as long as that passed, then it was simply processed through by our clerical staff. Anything outside the ordinary, of course, came into my specialist to be reviewed. But the throughput that that allowed, that was simply incredible. I mean, it absolutely was. That's terrific. I wanna turn now to Vanessa to talk a little bit more about the impact of what the pilot was able to achieve. We've heard about sort of how you made it all work. But Vanessa, maybe I can kick it over to you to take some time with that. Yes. Thank you, Yana. And thank you, Whitney and Jason, for the roles you both played in making this pilot happen. If we could move a few slides ahead. That's just the contact page, there we go. So as mentioned by my colleagues, tax credits like the earned income tax credit and the child tax credit have been some of the most successful anti-poverty policies in the U.S. Families were eligible for as much as 18,000 per year with the temporary expansions to the EITC and CTC drastically cutting child poverty rates. However, they don't often reach the very lowest income people and Illinois's pilot is proof that simplified filing solutions can reach those that are usually left behind. We could do next slide. So let's take a look at some of the pilot successes and what the data tells us. Just a note, this analysis was done with the data we had available last year when we released our report on the pilot. So some of my numbers may differ slightly from what Jason mentioned. With a response rate of 48%, the Illinois Department of Revenue gave refunds to nearly half of its intended recipients by the end of the pilot's first year. In the second year of the project, IDOR was able to issue refunds to 44% of recipients. These response rates are considerably higher than similar pilots in the early 2000s that took place in New York and California. The numbers don't tell us why, but this may be due to the fact that this pilot focused on people who had already claimed their federal EITC but did not claim the state EIC. Other possibilities include the accessibility of this pilot with both mail in and email options. But overall, in total over two years, the pilot issued refunds of over $12 million to low and middle income Illinoisans. There were slightly fewer refunds the second year but a higher dollar amount, as you can see. And nearly all of the refunds went out to individuals or couples earning less than $44,885 per year, which shows just how targeted to low and middle income households this pilot can be. Can we do the next slide? This pilot was particularly successful at reaching one of the groups traditionally least likely to claim their EITC, which is low income single filers. Just over 80% of dollars issued the first year and second year went to single filers earning less than $29,194 a year. The average refund for someone earning between $9,195 and $19,194 was nearly $600. Money like that can provide these households with much needed relief, help them make ends meet, pay some bills, buy groceries, and that type of support is invaluable. Next slide. This graph shows a breakdown of the total refunds issued during the pilot's first year between those whose income falls above and below the federal amount required for folks to file taxes. Roughly speaking, those under 65 years old filing as single do not need to file federal taxes if their income is under $12,550 per year or under $25,100 for those filing jointly. So for the first year of the pilot around one third of the total dollars or 1.96 million were distributed to people who normally earn too little to file taxes with most being single filers. If we consider these folks who earn less than the federal filing requirement as non-filers for the sake of argument, we can see here that the pilot was effective in dispersing nearly half of all first year refunds to very low income households typically not required to file. The remaining 53% of the total dollars or 3.2 million that year went out to single filers earning above the filing threshold, $12,500 but less than $29,194 per year which is still relatively lower income. Unfortunately, this level of data was not available for the second year at the time but a similar pattern is suggested. More detailed information on the number of refunds issued by income level for the first year can be found in our full report on our website. If we can move to the next slide. So in summary, Illinois's pilot to make the state earned income credit more accessible to taxpayers was incredibly successful and demonstrates the potential for a simpler approach to taxes that makes government work better for the public. The pilot had comparatively high uptake and expanded access to the state credit for lower income single adults. One of the groups most unlikely to claim their earned income tax credit. And this provides proof that a simpler way of filing for poverty fighting tax credits is possible both at the federal and state levels. As states look to provide more financial stability for struggling communities, this could be a game changer. Thinking of what's next, Illinois can begin a staggered effort to expand this pilot to reach additional populations that could benefit from this much needed cash assistance including individuals who do not currently file federal taxes as well as those newly eligible for Illinois state earned income credit from the 2022 expansion. So that's all for my part. I'll go ahead and pass it back to you. Great, thank you, Vanessa. I mean, very clearly there's been a lot of success with the pilot in reaching hard to reach populations and increasing uptake amongst those who don't have to file. I'm wondering if Jason, Whitney, Vanessa, anyone wanna reflect on what were some of the challenges that you've faced? You took a lot of steps to mitigate challenges in the way you designed and structured both the program and the way that you worked as a team. But I'm wondering if there were any unexpected challenges that you would like to lift up for others who might be thinking about an approach like this. Jason, nothing's really coming to mind initially which is a great thing where it's not like, oh, this was very difficult. Jason, can you think of anything off the top of your head that was a roadblock? I don't wanna say anything was a roadblock other than there are just issues that you have to deal with and you really have to be open and flexible to dealing with issues. I mean, clear direction from the start, knowing that you're going to do this, there can be a certain impression of handouts among people. And I did have to have conversation with my staff. You know, there is always the bugaboo of fraud. Everybody is afraid of it and as I've said before, simply because there's darkness out there, there's no reason not to turn on the light, okay? Everything can be work past as long as you have that will to decide to do it. Yeah, I didn't find anything all that much. Whitney was probably the thing that prevented everything from going wrong at any point during this. He fills my head with compliments but we did have a great team. We had little roadblocks like we would have loved to have issued refunds electronically but there are many that are unbanked that are a lower moderate income. So that would have been an additional challenge that we would have had to encounter but we did pursue a pathway with paper checks. Still kind of that unbanked. We have debit card options but we haven't pursued that yet. So definitely something we can look to in the future. I think with Illinois there was some programs of trying to help the unbanked have options available. Another thing that I think that will help in the near future is just our language access services. We don't have translated letters coming out of GenTax which is our tax operating system at this time and we have interpretation services. We just hadn't done an extensive job of promoting those opportunities. So in the very near future we'll have, all of our letters will have inserts promoting our language service availability. And so if there are taxpayers that may not have limited English proficiency we're going to be able to better reach them as well. So that could help increase our reach as well. That's great, thank you. And that sort of relates to looking forward. How are you thinking about expanding the program, building, doubling down? We do have these new expansions that passed in Illinois and a whole new set of filers who may not know that they're newly eligible. So just curious where you wanna see this go from here? Well, next Friday is EIC Awareness. So we always do a campaign to promote the credits availability. We definitely have a lot to speak about with our expansion in Illinois. So we'll be sure to include that. We have kind of identified a potential for any nonprofit organizations that would like to tie into our schema opportunities kind of like a tax, turbo tax would. We don't control fees, but and there's a definite layout that we utilize to accept electronic returns. So there is a potential for any kind of nonprofit organizations to go down that route. There wouldn't be any special treatment. It's just an opportunity available to anyone wanting to pursue that path. So that is something we are looking to. And then we do have the expanded, we have people over 65 and people without children that now qualify. Great, mute button again, no problem. Jason, is there anything that you would like to add? Thank you for that, Whitney. I don't know. I actually had all in favor of getting taxpayers to file without our assistance. You know, I have plenty of work to do and they would get the information, they would get three funds sooner, but other than that, not much. Great, Vanessa. Anything that you'd like to see working with Illinois going forward? Well, I don't want to disclose too much because I know Megan and Carl will be talking about possible solutions next, but no, yeah, thanks. Like I said before, thanks so much Whitney and Jason for all your work and they're really the experts in this from. Thanks, but that's my cue, I think. Well, we do have an audience question that came up. We do have an audience question that came up. Oh, you're right. So there was a question asking whether we could provide the names and contact information for the folks from New York and Illinois discussing the process that they went through. And I think we have a slide coming up at the end that has everyone's contact information. And if not, we'll make sure we get it to folks. There's one more question. So there is. Yeah, so there's, that's okay. Oh, I see. This is a question from Jim. Can you share what portion of the EIC credits in the pilot were claimed via email filings versus mail filings? Jason, do you, do you have a way to differentiate? Not easily. We basically treat all of the responses the same way plus our email or faxes go to an email server too. So it'd be a little hard to separate that out. I do know that we saw a significant uptick in responses electronically versus traditional mail, but that's also because we actively promoted that when they would call in. That's a labor savings on our side. We do scan all of our incoming correspondence. And so if they respond electronically, I'll save us some time. Well, that might be a nice thing to add too, Jason, because your team added a message and the inbound call waiting. So if they couldn't speak directly with an agent, there was a kind of a message playing in the background. And so they, his unit directed people who were calling about this letter and invited them to email the letter to this specific email address. That is true. We actually do modify our inbound messages based upon what we're mailing. And in this case, we did know that we would have to differentiate from our normal callers. So we did specifically say that if you've received notice that you're doing a refund, you only had to sign the page and send it back. This means a lot of people didn't go all the way through the phone system, have to tell somebody they got the information right up front. That's great. Not the phone menu rabbit hole, which is always welcome to not have to deal with. So thank you, Whitney and Jason and Vanessa. I think we'd like to pivot now to Tara and Megan to talk a little bit more about recommendations for state action. So I will, I guess, Tara, Megan, take it away. I'm not sure who's gonna talk. Sure. I'm happy to jump in, Megan, unless seeing, yeah, you prefer to. I mean, I think before we'd say, you know, what can states do now? I've just lift up and say, Illinois had a 40% increase in what taxpayers are owed by the law of Illinois and $12 million back in the pockets of folks in the state. It's incredibly impressive, even with approximate data. A similar program was run in California called Ready Return, a 50,000 person pilot had a 20% increase in the similar return. Nine people affirmatively wrote and said that 95% said their experience with a tax agency was wonderful, you know, again, billions of dollars back in New York City ran a pilot. There's a city, a tax agency, and with a similar level of outcomes. So for folks states who are contemplating, should I do this? There is a body of incredible evidence that a version of a pre-filled form works. You're not starting fresh. There's a body of real high-impact evidence here. So I want to just lay that before you think about what you might do next. There are three models that you can follow. Every state is different, but you don't have to be first. You can learn from, as Jason named, some complications. Maybe next slide. The, you know, you can repeat an experiment that has worked three times, this thing, this kind of thing one, make it simple to automate returns for state EIC or federal EITC. If that feels like you need a little more proof and evidence, you know, there are places you can start. You can test your forms with humans. A good user research test isn't millions. It could be 12 people. You witness do a study of what it's like to fill out a form or ask them, hey, you just received this letter. It's really similar. What did you think it was? I think it was shocking to the New York State Tax Agency that a letter requesting information was 100% perceived as an audit initiation. So, you know, step one is every government agency has forms and letters. You could start, if you didn't want to run and repeat Whitney's Jason's incredible pilot or, you know, Governor Pritzker's incredible pilot, you could start by small with improving the communications uptake of a single form. If you, you know, an even lighter weight way is to walk in the shoes of a single average claimant and see where the bottleneck points are. It may not be where you expect the call center may be easier. It may in fact be the finding of your state's website because when you search tax in Illinois, you know, it may be something else that isn't the official site or tax in Georgia that comes up. So, three things that states could do is replicate a pilot with a body of evidence. And I feel like it's probably not someone on this webinar today who wouldn't pick up the phone if you were thinking about taking that step and talk about a next piece. If you need a team to help you do it, the new practice lab will happily send you a spread team to repeat what's been done in these three places. Meagan, I want to open up to you to see what else you might do speaking more specifically about from your experience on the state level. Yeah, absolutely. So I think one of the, the Illinois example is an amazing example of, you know, a state figuring out how to really drastically simplify just getting people the money that they're owed and letting them know as opposed to waiting for them to come to Illinois and say, hey, you didn't give me this money. People didn't even know they were owed it. So the state already knew they went directly to people and said, hey, we're gonna make it really easy for you. You actually, we still owe you money and you should have gotten this tax credit. So there's a lot states can do to do that. I'll go to the next slide. But one thing that, so one thing that the pilot was able to do was to reach, you know, lower income people who maybe are just above the line of who needs to file and then also some people who don't need to file, but did anyway. That pilot really reached people who already are comfortable filing federal taxes and who made the choice to file federal taxes. There's thousands and millions of other people in the country, I mean, thousands in Illinois and millions in the country who are low enough income that they just don't need to file. And because sometimes the process can be very complicated, can be scary, there's lots of different reasons people have for not filing. There's many, many, many really low income people who just never get their tax credits even though they're owed tax credits. So there's a number of different challenges that make the people who actually need these tax credits the most not get them. And there's lots of things states can try. So one of the things that states can try, which granted is more work for sure is creating a non-filer or simplified filing portal for the state earned income tax credit or other tax credits that are targeted at very low income individuals. So we're thinking similar to what the IRS did two years ago with the non-filer tool to help more people access their stimulus checks because so many people didn't need to file and wouldn't automatically get their checks, other approaches like similar to getctc.org. And states that are interested in doing that can find help from others. So I'm sure New Practice Lab would love to help people figure out how to do that or get closer to that. Code for America Propel is a company that helps people with food stamps. There's lots of different people out there that are trying to help more people access their state tax credits and their other benefits more simply using technology. The other piece that we would love to see happen in Illinois and in other states is that government agencies already have much of the data that they need to remove pain points in this process. So the way that most of our taxes work right now to use an example I've read from someone else I didn't come up with this. It's like if your credit card sent you a bill and it was blank and they said we know you charge things but we wanna know if you know what you charged you send us what you charged and then we'll let you know if you're right. And that's kind of the way that we do it right now but we already have a lot of that information already in the data systems that states have and in the data systems that IRS has. So even if people don't earn enough to file taxes they have, if they're low income they have often spent a ton of time already proving their income to the state for state benefits. And so there are different ways that agencies within a state can work together to use existing benefits data to proactively issue credits to low income families. So you can take a look at your state and see what low income populations do you already have where you already have income data, dependent data and contact information for there may be some small changes in the application processes for those benefits or the recertification processes in the forms that would allow people to like prove their income for one agency if they've already done that and they're already recertifying that every year they could automatically get a pre-populated return at the end of the year. And integrating an opt out option into benefits application and recertification processes would allow states to do that. Of course there's gonna have to be working through kind of some of the data sharing behind the scenes but the state can make that very easy for people so they don't have to do all of that multiple times. So for example, Illinois already asks people in their ABE application if people have done or are planning on filing taxes but we don't go the extra step of making sure we have the exact right number of dependents that would be claimed on tax credits. So there's like little tweaks that can be made to our application processes. So for example, in Illinois, Medicaid is a better proxy than some of the other benefits of something we've looked at. So DHS could work with IDOR to get them the data they need so they can reach out and proactively do an automated return that would just make it very easy for people to sign, correct anything that's be correct and send it back. None of this would work if it's honors and difficult for people to understand similar to what everybody has been saying Tara, Alberto. So collaborating together across departments to make the process really proactive and simple for the user and working out those details on the back end. So the user is maybe only interacting with one department at a time. They're being able to do very simple processes that are really easy for them, go a long way to also improving trust in the government. And so going back to what Tara said, that means testing, if you do create a new process testing your forms and letters with real humans, do they work on cell phones? There's lots of people who don't have computers. Do they work on government phones? That's been an issue we've heard about. Do they work for people with limited literacy or limited English, people with limited computer skills? And then also testing your processes with different people. So some challenges we've heard about from interviews with people is if you create a process for really low income people that requires them to say give their adjusted gross income from previous years that might be an issue for people because maybe they've never filed taxes before because they haven't made enough money. Or does your process work for people without a permanent address? If people move a lot because they don't have a lot of money or they're living in their car, do you have a way for them to get their information and also prove their identity otherwise? Do your processes work for grandparents or aunts and uncles who are caring for children who are the primary caregiver? So there's just a number of things that states can do to make sure that tax credits are getting to lower income people. Jason also brought up something that I wanted to make sure he had a chance to say about some options other states can have. Well, this goes back to the fact that we all do receive the same kind of information and have the same kind of processes. We bill out, we can use federal tax information. For states that do use the GenTax operating system, it might be a little bit of a less of a lift for them because they can replicate what we have done here. The infrastructure and programming will be relatively similar. Awesome, and then I'm going to turn it back over to Yana. Great, thank you, Megan, Tara, Jason, for timing back in. I feel like that's a really important hook to get more states doing this if it's low-hanging fruit. I want to open it up. If there are more questions from the audience, please do populate the chat. We have a few more minutes for questions. And I feel so grateful to have had the opportunity to hear from this set of panelists who are making the very mundane work of government and serving government employees. Super exciting and super sexy and making sure that government works for those of us, and particularly those who are struggling to make ends meet. And so I wanted to, if there are no more questions, I'll check one more time in the Slido. There are no more questions, just ask each of you. If there are one thing that you would like to lift up from either your experience working with these kinds of pilots and programs in New York and Illinois or elsewhere at the federal level that you'd like the folks who are on today's call to walk away with about this work. Maybe Alberto, we can start with you. Who is Alberto? All right, we'll come back. Whitney, would you like to go next? I couldn't find that mute button. You know, I think it's all about evaluating what we're sending out and making that as easy to understand. Sometimes we like to hear our jargon and no one knows what that is. So make it simple and make it easy for them to respond kind of across the board. Whitney. Jason. I would have to say that also there was a lot of takeaways from this project. But above all things, the clear direction. I mean, knowing that you have, you're going to do it. That's just so important. I mean, because too often we do get together and continuously try to decide if we're going to do something. In this case, it was very clear from the start. So clear direction helps everybody get involved. And again, shout out to Whitney there. She's probably the greatest takeaway of the project. Just get her cloned for the rest of the states. You two sound like a great team and it's important to support each other in doing that work. So thank you for that, Jason. I think we have Alberto back. Can I go back to you now? Yeah, sorry. My computer first for a second, I couldn't hit any button. Yes, my takeaway would be it's important to look. Any government process or actually any process through the users or in this case, the citizen size, that changes and it gives you a whole new perspective of what you're trying to do. Great, thank you. Megan, you're next on the screen. Yeah, absolutely. I would just say that states have what they need to make it super easy for people to, like it doesn't have to be as complicated as we make it. So that's the only thing that I would say and it just takes the will like Jason said. Vanessa? Sure, so a lot of the work that I do involves interviewing and speaking with community members about their experiences with the toll text filing process. And it's complicated, it's very tough. Even if people have got a master's degree, even for me who works with this every day, there's a lot that I don't understand. And so like Megan said, like states have a lot of the existing tools already, whether it be data collected from state agencies, the IRS or creating a simplified filing portal similar to what was done on the federal level with get CTC, there's just many ways that are possible for us to simplify this very complicated process. And if we want people to interact with the system more, then we have to make it more people friendly. Tara? There's a mountain of evidence that the types of cash amount we're talking about, the $12 million back in the pockets of Illinois in the families of Illinois hands can make a profound difference, not especially for families with young kids, not only in the lives of the kids, but literally there's evidence in the lives of their kids. So the stakes for failing to deliver what we can are really high. And you don't have to go first. There's amazing examples from folks on this call of listening to users and using existing state and federal data to make it as simple as possible. So you can waft off the experimentation work of at least three other states. And there's plenty of us here to help if you're contemplating trying to make this really happen for your community or your state. That's great. Thank you, Tara. And everyone really clear, I think, principles to kind of carry forward. Can you move to the last slide or second to go forward on the slide deck? Because I think that's where we have information for contact. And just want to put one more plug in for the full report for the Illinois Earned Income Tax Credit Simplified Filing Pilot, which you can find on the New America Chicago site. Just one last thank you to this terrific panel. And we will send up follow-up information to those who participated into today's call. And just want to thank you all for taking the time to join us and learn more about the great work that's happening in Illinois, New York, and elsewhere to make sure that we get these resources to the families who need it most. So thank you everyone for a wonderful weekend.