A brief report on our quantitative research about messages that increase people's take-up of government benefits by making them feel like those benefits belong to them.
The IRS is arguably the single most critical benefits administrator in the country, given its responsibility for tax credit-based relief programs, and COVID-19 relief payments. Despite these programs’ incredible progress in reducing poverty, and despite great strides by the IRS to implement them successfully, accessing IRS benefits remains too difficult for many low-income families. This report presents a comprehensive agenda to increase benefit coverage rates, simplify Americans’ interactions with the IRS, and decrease the portion of IRS benefits diverted to third parties.
This article examines how applying a Racial Equity Framework reveals systemic inequities in the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC) program, offering insights into barriers faced by marginalized communities and potential solutions.
This Code for America article discusses how tax filing can be a powerful tool for economic justice, highlighting efforts to make the tax system more accessible and equitable for low-income individuals.
ACCESS NYC is an online public screening tool that residents can use to determine the City, State, and Federal health and human service benefit programs for which they are eligible.
This report examines how the U.S. federal government can enhance the efficiency and equity of benefit delivery by simplifying eligibility rules and using a Rules as Code approach for digital systems.
Github repository for Policy Rules Database, which encodes up-to-date rules and provisions for all major federal and state public assistance programs, taxes, and tax credits.
The Policy Rules Database (PRD), developed by the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta and the National Center for Children in Poverty, consolidates complex rules for major U.S. federal and state benefit programs and tax policies into a standardized, easy-to-use format. This database allows researchers to model public assistance impacts, simulate policy changes, and analyze benefits cliffs across various household scenarios using common rules and language across different programming platforms.
PolicyEngine is a nonprofit that provides a free, open-source web app enabling users in the US and UK to estimate taxes and benefits at the household level, while also simulating the effects of policy changes. By combining tax and benefits data, PolicyEngine helps individuals and policymakers better understand the impacts of existing policies and proposed reforms, using microsimulation models built from legislation and enhanced survey data.
In this report, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce Foundation examines benefits cliffs – the loss of eligibility for public safety-net programs and benefits they provide as income rises above eligibility limits.
This article examines how administrative burdens in U.S. social safety net programs have changed over the past 30 years, showing that while average burdens have declined, inequality in who faces these burdens has grown.
The ANNALS of the American Academy of Political and Social Science
The Atlanta Fed’s CLIFF tools provide greater transparency to workers about potential public assistance losses when their earnings increase. We find three broad themes in organization-level implementation of the CLIFF tools: identifying the tar- get population of users; integrating the tool into existing operations; and integrating the tool into coaching sessions.
