Low-Income Taxpayer Clinic

Anna Donovan: Welcome back to Applying Yourself, a law school admissions podcast from Washington University’s School of Law in St. Louis. My name is Anna Donovan. I’m the Director of Operations and Admissions Communications in the admissions office. Today we have back with us Sarah Narkiewicz. She’s the Associate Dean of Clinical Education, but she is also the Director of one of our clinics, our Low-Income Taxpayer Clinic. We’re excited to have her back. Back-to-back podcast episodes. Welcome back, Sarah.

Sarah Narkiewicz: Thank you, Anna. It’s great to be back.

Anna Donovan: Excellent. So I know on the other podcast, we covered kind of the Clinical Education office and space in general and the 50th anniversary, but we kind of want to dig into what can I only assume is your favorite thing in the whole wide world, tax law. Can you tell us a little bit about, I guess, your specific background in tax law and then how you got into the clinic office?

Sarah Narkiewicz: Yes, my kids might take offense if they think my favorite thing in the world is tax law, but you’re probably right. So I was an accounting major, and that’s actually an unusual background for a tax attorney. Believe it or not, most tax attorneys discover it in law school, fall in love with it, and actually never knew they had an interest in it. So I was lucky. I figured it out early.

But upon graduating from WashU last century, I started practicing tax law here in St. Louis at a big firm setting, really interesting, intellectually stimulating work. But after my first child was born, I came to work at WashU, and in the tax clinic, I focus on a different kind of tax, and that’s tax controversy representing low-income taxpayers. And I truly, truly love that aspect of tax because I am able to use my legal skills to really make a difference in the lives of people who are suffering.

Anna Donovan: Excellent. So, you know, pretend I’m a law student, and maybe I’m not specifically at this point knowing that I’m in love with tax law, but what would be your pitch for someone to consider participating in the Low-Income Taxpayer Clinic?

Sarah Narkiewicz: Yeah, so first of all, my tagline, anyone that knows me will know that I think tax is fun. So tax is fun. And that summarizes all of it.

But I think tax is relevant to every single one of us, whether we know it or care or not. Every single person, whether they have an interest in tax or not, should absolutely take federal income tax in law school because it will be a class that will be applicable for your entire life. Hopefully, you will be a taxpayer. That’s a good thing.

Yes. But why you should do the Low-Income Taxpayer Clinic is because it doesn’t matter if you have a specific interest in tax. What this particular clinic offers that is kind of unusual in the clinical setting is the opportunity to work directly with individual clients. We have some other direct representation clinics, but a lot of our clinics focus more on entities or corporations. Here you’re working with individuals, people you can really relate to. You have a chance to see the difference that your legal work will make in their lives.

Oftentimes, the work that my students is doing is making the difference between a child eating or not, or someone keeping their lights on, or someone getting evicted or not. So it’s really, really cool work.

Just a few months ago, I had a case where we had a disabled client who had correctly filed his tax return. He was a dishwasher. Correctly filed his tax return. The IRS decided in its infinite wisdom to add a couple of zeros onto his income. And suddenly, instead of getting a refund, he had a tax bill that was several hundred thousand dollars.

Anna Donovan: Oh my gosh.

Sarah Narkiewicz: That also, unfortunately, meant that he was no longer eligible for Social Security because his income was way too high. So he was in danger of actually losing his housing, having this huge tax bill, all over something really basic that my students could look at, analyze, case plan, and make a difference. So I’m happy to report that particular client is resolved, back to being a productive citizen, and happy.

Anna Donovan: Excellent. So say a student is starting in your clinic at the start of the semester. What does their kind of caseload, their workload, you know, any kind of classroom component for the tax clinic?

Sarah Narkiewicz: Yeah, so every clinic has a classroom component. We call that the seminar. So every clinic would have a two-hour seminar each week. In the tax clinic in particular, in week one, you start out interviewing your clients. So you are actually interacting with real people in the first week. And it sounds scary, but it’s really not as bad as it sounds because you are being directly supervised. Your questions are being answered. Everything you’re doing is being reviewed before you go out.

But you have the chance to really put your legal skills into practice week one. So you do the interview. You write a memo recommending whether or not we take the client. You discuss it with me. And then we come up with a case plan. It’s your case plan. I help you vet it. Then we work together. You come up with the solution. I kind of tell you whether or not that’ll work or not. But you have to kind of figure it out yourself. And then in the end, you execute the client’s happy.

Anna Donovan: Excellent.

Sarah Narkiewicz: The client’s always happy, right?

Anna Donovan: Right.

Sarah Narkiewicz: Yes. We do our best.

Anna Donovan: Do the students work individually one-to-one with clients or do they work in groups or different teams?

Sarah Narkiewicz: So in the tax clinic, we do have teams of students, but cases are individual. So for example, what that means is that even though it’s your case, your partner is always in the room with you when you do the interview as sort of a second chair to take notes, to ask questions you might miss. And you also can use your partner just sort of as someone to bounce ideas off, right? Because so much of law comes through collaboration and representing clients comes through collaboration. So having someone else know about your case really helps.

Anna Donovan: And for the, I guess like getting clients, where do those come from and how do they get kind of directed towards you and the services at the clinic?

Sarah Narkiewicz: So interestingly, our big opponent is the IRS, but the IRS actually funds this particular clinic and they direct clients directly to us. So if you are a person getting a notice in the mail from the IRS, they’re going to include our contact information. So we get a lot of clients directly from the IRS.

We do a lot of outreach in the community. One of our jobs is to do community education. My goal for this year is to work with high school students to teach them about tax literacy, but we also work with single moms, disabled veterans, all kinds of immigrant organizations, so we get a lot of clients through those channels as well.

Anna Donovan: Do you feel like the students get to, you know, I guess based on the clients’ needs, like work on different types of problems and sort of what problems? if you can say.

Sarah Narkiewicz: Yeah, yeah. No, there are so many different types of cases we work on. So a lot of our cases come to us with people that owe money, and they know they owe money, but they just can’t afford to pay. So I’m sure everyone that’s listening, the billions of listeners listening, have seen those TV commercials where you can settle your tax debts for pennies on the dollar, right? There is actually a program where you can compromise your tax.

Unfortunately, those TV ads are predators. So what oftentimes we see are people that have come in and they owe something like $20,000 in tax, and they’re paying these TV people, for lack of a better word, $5,000 and getting nothing done, right? So those are called offers and compromise. We do those for free and oftentimes can save people tens, twenties, hundreds of thousands of dollars.

We do innocent spouse cases. We go to tax court and represent people who have credible claims. We deal a lot with the office of appeals and negotiate cases. So I’d say our cases divide roughly into two segments, those that owe and can’t afford to pay, and those that have substantive claims. But the ways you solve those two types of cases are myriad. There’s so many different things we can do.

Anna Donovan: Yeah, and do, you know, kind of, I guess, hearkening back to your experience at the firm, can you talk a little about the kind of the difference between kind of what the work you did there and what the students do and if there might be similarities or sort of what, also, I guess, what someone who really wants to pursue tax law, like, might be doing out in the real world after they graduate?

Sarah Narkiewicz: Yeah, so absolutely. I mean, tax is an incredibly broad and fascinating area. And I want to throw out there that those that pursue tax law tend to be happier than those that pursue other areas of law. You can look at the studies. It’s true. But you can do so many different things in tax.

What I was doing in the big firm setting was more tax planning, right? Working with high net worth clients. But there’s also estate planning. There’s tax controversy, and you can do tax controversy in a big firm setting. So so many different things—M&A, individual, etc.

The overlapping commonality, of course, is the Internal Revenue Code and the Internal Revenue Service, right? What’s a little bit different about what we’re doing in the clinic that you may or may not be doing in a firm is actually solving a problem. Oftentimes in the firm setting, you are trying to prevent the problem, right? You’re planning to prevent it. But you can certainly do controversy on a higher dollar scale in a law firm.

But everything you learn, right, is going to be applicable to any sort of tax practice. A lot of my students end up going into estate planning, but they have that basis in the code. They have the research. They have the ability to do interviewing, all of which comes into play in that area.

Anna Donovan: Excellent. Sarah, I feel like I don’t usually ask this, but is there anything I missed? Is there anything else you would like to tell our billions of listeners about the tax clinic, about tax, about anything really?

Sarah Narkiewicz: So, so many things. What I love about what I do, and it’s not specific to tax, it’s just that I get to make a difference, right? It’s so hard sometimes when you’re practicing law because the law is gray and you don’t always get to see the tangible result of what you have done, but so often in the clinical setting, we can really see what we’ve done.

Last year, we were really privileged in the tax clinic to have one of our clients featured by the Missouri Bar as an example of what a lawyer can do for you, right? And this was a client who had a lot of health problems. She was about to lose her house. I don’t think she would have lost her house, but in her mind, she was going to lose her house. And we were able to just relieve that stress, right? And I got to go to the video shoot. It was a professional video shoot, not as professional as your podcast, but pretty awesome. And it was just so cool to see, and it was in her house, right? It was so cool to see the impact on the day-to-day life of what we do for our clients and to see the work that the students did and how meaningful it is.

So I would just like to close by reiterating that tax is fun. And it can be lucrative. It can be. Lots of tax jobs out there. It is a very highly employable area, right? It’s pretty awesome. There’s nothing that can go wrong with tax. So I would encourage everyone to explore the Low-Income Taxpayer Clinic. And tax is awesome.

Anna Donovan: Yeah, absolutely. You know, I think, obviously, we always hope that anyone who’s listening, if you’re considering law school, that you’ll consider applying to WashU Law. But really, you know, any and most law schools out there offer clinics. You should really dig into those opportunities and sort of the impact they might be making on those other communities. And everyone should hope that their clinic office is directed by someone as passionate as Sarah is. And truly, you know, incredible. You know, selling this institution and knowing all the good that the students do makes my job very, very easy.

So we like to end our shows on highlighting something about St. Louis. And I know you were dying to tell us what your favorite restaurant in St. Louis is.

Sarah Narkiewicz: Okay, so as I mentioned, I have kids. So that limits. And they’re old enough to have broader tastes, but yet they don’t. But I would say my favorite type of food is Mexican. St. Louis is probably not known for their Mexican food. Mexican, so I, but I wanna put a plug in for Taco Buddha because it is one of my favorites. It’s local. It’s in U. City. And apparently they have breakfast tacos.

Anna Donovan: Yeah, yeah they do. And I think they opened a second location in Kirkwood as well. So it’s that good.

Sarah Narkiewicz: That’s right.

Anna Donovan: It’s that good that they needed another location in the county, which is fantastic. But if anyone needs chicken finger recommendations, on my way.

All of our billions and those rooms will be emailing you specifically for those chicken finger recommendations. Awesome. Thank you so much for joining us again. Everyone consider tax. It’s fun.

Sarah Narkiewicz: It’s fun, but any clinic is good.

Anna Donovan: Any clinic is good. Any and every clinic. Take all the opportunities you can in law school. So thank you again, everyone.

Sarah Narkiewicz: Thank you, Anna.

Anna Donovan: All right, bye.

Sarah Narkiewicz: Bye.