Nov 13, 2020
Earned Income Tax Credits (EITC) can provide up to $10,000 annually for qualifying California families, but estimates suggest that about 20% of eligible families do not receive the benefits. Wendi Gosliner, a researcher at the Nutrition Policy Institute, and her University of California (UC), Berkeley and UC San Francisco colleagues presented preliminary findings from a study exploring perceptions and use of the EITC among families with young children in California at the 2020 virtual Association for Public Policy Analysis and Management (APPAM) annual research conference on November 11, 2020. The study—which is being conducted virtually throughout California—is finding that about half of the eligible families do not know about and are not participating in the EITC. Even among families receiving the benefit, there is substantial confusion about why and how they received it. The study was co-presented at APPAM with study collaborators Lia Fernald of the UC Berkeley School of Public Health and Rita Hamad of UC San Francisco.
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