Why This Banker Spent 16 Hours a Week Filing Taxes (and How He Gets CRA Credit For It)

Tax season can be a stressful time of year for those who don’t really understand the filing process. One slip-up can cause serious legal and financial issues, and not everyone is prepared for what it takes to file their taxes. Low-income and minority individuals are especially vulnerable. Without someone to guide them through the process, some individuals may be unable to file their taxes at all. 

That’s where volunteers like Ed Fortmiller come in. 

Ed is the Consumer Lending and CRA Officer at Citizens Bank, a $1 billion bank based in Oregon. From February to April 2024, he spent nearly 200 hours helping low-income individuals file their taxes. 

This volunteer work didn’t start as a bank initiative. “My wife is part of a women's group on Facebook, and she does some volunteer work with them,” Ed said. “One of her good friends was asking for tax prep volunteers, and my wife ‘voluntold’ me.” 

Ed admits he didn’t know exactly what he was getting into. “I spent about 30 hours training to become IRS-certified,” he said. “I watched every video super carefully because I did not want to mess these taxes up.” 

At first, Ed was nervous about volunteering 16 hours a week (8 on Fridays and 8 on Saturdays) for so long. But once he got started, he found that he enjoyed the process and loved seeing the smiles on his clients’ faces. In the end, Ed helped file over 80 tax returns, and most of his clients were low-income and/or minority individuals.

One of Ed’s most memorable clients was a young single mom who only made around $7,000 a year. With Ed’s help, she was able to get almost that much back in her return, effectively doubling her income because of the various credits she qualified for. “She was thrilled,” Ed said. “And seeing her excitement made all of this work worth it.”

Ed is grateful his job allows him to spend time volunteering. Even though Ed’s service wasn’t originally through the bank, he has found a way to combine the two—and he even expects to receive credit under the Community Reinvestment Act (CRA) for his service hours. 

For service hours to qualify under the CRA, they must meet three criteria:

1. A volunteer must represent the bank

2. They must provide their financial expertise

3. The work must fit into one of the community development hooks, which as of 2024 are:

   1. 1. Affordable housing

      2. Community services

      3. Economic development

      4. Revitalize and stabilize

Ed's tax aide checks all these boxes. 

The Community Reinvestment Act is a big deal for banks because every few years they go through an exam. Each bank is rated based on how well it serves its community, and a poor rating can affect mergers, new bank products, and the bank’s reputation. 

Citizens Bank has scored a “Satisfactory” for several exams in a row, and that’s largely due to the volunteer work of employees like Ed. But this volunteer work only counts if it’s properly tracked.

Tracking service hours for CRA can be more difficult than it sounds. An employee can’t just say they volunteered and call it good. Ed needs to know the following information: 

• Where they volunteered

• When they volunteered + how many hours

• If they were representing the bank

• If they were using their financial expertise

• If their work fell under one of the community development hooks

• If they were helping low-to-moderate-income individuals, and if so, how many

• How their service impacts the community

Ed takes all this data and determines if it might qualify under the CRA. He reviews each service hour, marks it “CRA-eligible” or “not CRA-eligible,” and adds his qualifying rationale. When it’s time for an exam, Ed adds all these service hours to a report and gives it to examiners for review. Since examiners get the final say on what counts or not, it’s important that Ed tells the story and helps examiners come to the same conclusion.

Many banks use spreadsheets and outdated software to manage all this data and provide their rationale. This is typically difficult and time-consuming. Luckily for Ed and his fellow Citizens Bank employees, they use Kadince software to track and manage service hours. 

“I created an internal Kadince form,” Ed said, “that allows me to track and manage all the volunteer hours in the bank. People volunteer, they fill out the form, and then I can see their service and mark it as CRA-qualified or not. I can even run reports on this data. Anytime I want to see what we’ve done in the community, I can pull it all up in Kadince.” 

Ed is a CRA team of one, and Kadince has been crucial to his success in tracking data, adding the CRA qualifying rationale, and preparing his bank for the next CRA exam. And because logging hours is so fast and easy, he’s faced less pushback from employees and has been able to collect more hours than ever before.

“Kadince has changed the way I manage CRA data,” Ed said. Before using Kadince, Ed kept track of Citizens Bank's donations, service hours, and community development loans on spreadsheets. When an employee volunteered, they filled out their hours in a spreadsheet, and Ed then compiled everything into a master sheet. Not only was this method cumbersome for him, but he began to get pushback from employees who claimed the process was too difficult. 

“Eventually, I started shopping around for a tracking software,” Ed said. “I quickly knew that Kadince was the one because it seemed like it did the most bang for the dollar.” Now, Citizens Bank uses Kadince to manage donations, service hours, community development loans, and investments. 

With Kadince, Ed is able to focus less on managing data and more on encouraging employees to volunteer. “One of the biggest challenges I’ve faced is simply educating my coworkers on what CRA means and what criteria their service hours have to fit,” Ed said. “It’s hard when employees volunteer for something thinking it will count, and then it doesn’t. So I’ve really been trying to educate them and work these criteria into our volunteer conversations. The Kadince form has been a huge help with this. I can put the criteria right on there so they know upfront if it might count. Plus, it’s easy for me to create, easy for them to fill out, and easy for me to view and run reports.” 

It helps that Ed is leading the charge. The tax aide prep he’s done this year is a solid example of good, CRA-qualifying volunteer work, and his coworkers have taken notice.  

Ed is happy with the way his tax aide volunteerism turned out. “My wife may have voluntold me at the start,” he said, “but I really enjoyed doing it. I'll definitely be doing it again next year!”

As Ed knows very well, the more help you can give your community (and the more CRA credit you can get), the better. 

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Want to learn more about tracking, managing, and reporting service hours and other community development data with Kadince? Schedule a 30-minute demo to see how Ed does it. 

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