Being an international student at Wesleyan means distance from one’s support systems, prohibitively expensive travel, and convoluted tax regulations to obey on pain of deportation. The laws cover a myriad of income sources and vary based on a country’s diplomatic relations with the United States. These challenges are especially acute for low-income international students, who often work many jobs and must figure out how to correctly pay taxes on their financial aid.
For this article, several students spoke on the condition of anonymity about their personal finances. Interviewees specified various concerns behind their requests for anonymity, including one member of the class of 2023, who was worried about the legal consequences of sharing her experiences.
“I think I have most probably committed tax fraud unintentionally because I still do not understand how taxes work in the U.S., and because I did not receive adequate support throughout the process,” the member of the class of 2023 said. “It is very likely that I have misunderstood the forms and/or did not declare everything that I needed to declare as legally required.”
By default, the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) withholds 14% of all financial aid in excess of tuition (that is, room and board) and 30% of all other non-wage payments (such as awards) for non-resident aliens (NRAs), individuals who have lived in the United States for less than five years. In many cases, these amounts differ based on tax treaties that lessen the burden for specific countries’ citizens. The U.S. tax code can seem both unfamiliar and threatening, especially for those on F-1 visas, which are required for non-immigrant students studying in the United States.
“As international students, we’re doing it on our own,” a member of the class of 2024 said. “We don’t have parents that file taxes for us or someone who would show [us] how to do it. So we’re always kind of like…‘I hope this is right, but if I made a mistake, I hope I don’t get audited and then deported.’”
Tax law, which is as dense and convoluted as any other legal writing, is a particular challenge for students who speak English as a second or third language. The meanings of words may not be immediately clear even to native speakers of English. For instance, a student who has lived in the United States for three years is not legally classified as a resident, which is not intuitive from the word’s common definition.
It takes time and expertise to determine which income sources are taxable, by how much, and what else is necessary for an individual’s tax return. The University provides all NRA students with subscriptions to Sprintax, a tax preparation software platform. However, the software and its instructions can be difficult to interpret, especially if students have missed a deadline and need to catch up.
“I think the school doesn’t understand that this technology is only assistive to a certain extent,” the member of the class of 2023 said. “Even though you put in all of your specificities in terms of your country of origin, and therefore there are special trade and tax agreements between countries…things fall through the cracks within the system. You actually need someone who’s an expert to assist students through the tax filing procedure to ensure that students are not committing tax fraud.”
For the University’s 466 international students, one full-time staff member is assigned to assist with taxes and wages. Senior Accountant/Tax Specialist Christine Rodrigue is the sole staffer at the Office of International Compensation and Taxation (OICT) and helps students determine their tax residency status, obtain Social Security numbers (SSNs), and get started with Sprintax. Students noted that it often takes her a long time to respond to emails, if she’s able to reply at all.
“We email Christine and she just does not respond, because she can’t,” the anonymous member of the class of 2024 said. “She probably gets so many emails, especially closer to the deadline in April. She just can’t respond to everyone.”
Some of these questions are outside of Rodrigue’s purview anyway, since she is not permitted to comment on individual tax returns. Many NRA students speculated that the University believes offering this type of advice could present legal liabilities.
“While I can educate the student about their tax status and reporting obligations, I cannot advise a student regarding an individual tax return,” Rodrigue wrote in an email to The Argus.
Rodrigue noted that she runs recurring webinars to help students begin using Sprintax and that Sprintax can provide individual assistance through a chat function. However, the chat function is an automated assistant with a limited understanding of users’ questions, and the anonymous member of the class of 2023 described the webinar as a cursory overview.
“I remember going for that workshop and being completely disappointed,” the member of the class of 2023 said. “She just walked us through how to sign up for Sprintax and explained very briefly the functions of Sprintax, without explaining at all how to file actual taxes in America and all the legal consequences if one were to file taxes incorrectly.”
This level of assistance seems to be the standard at colleges and universities. Amherst College directs students to Sprintax for any individual questions, and Yale University notes that staff cannot comment on individual tax returns.
Because personal accounting help is not available from the University, international students often develop networks of support, with friends trying to answer one another’s questions. Students, like the University’s administration, are apprehensive about the responsibility of providing tax guidance.
“I think a lot of students are scared to give tax advice because it could be consequential to someone’s status,” Jennie Ebihara ’24 said.
Given the obscure U.S. tax code and the lack of readily available personal help, international students often encounter fines and frustration. The member of the class of 2023 paid $150 in 2021 after filing her Connecticut income taxes incorrectly.
Jiahong Chen ’24, a Canadian citizen, is nearly certain that he needs to file taxes in only one country, but he usually pays income tax in both countries on all of his income out of concern that he might make a consequential mistake.
“I’m afraid that if I don’t report tax in Canada, what if something happens?” Chen said. “I wouldn’t get in trouble if I pay extra taxes.”
Ebihara, who studied remotely from abroad in Fall 2020, was unsure about her tax obligations when she traveled to the University in Spring 2021. She ultimately learned that she did not need to file for that year.
“[I was] really confused whether I had to do taxes in March or April because some of my friends who were there fall semester on campus were doing their taxes,” Ebihara said. “I think that communication off the bat, especially during COVID, was not great from the school.”
Obtaining an identification number for tax purposes can also be complex. Students are never required to mail their passports anywhere, but confusion about this topic led one anonymous member of the class of 2026 to do so in the summer of 2023.
Because he had trouble navigating Sprintax, he was late in requesting an International Taxpayer Identification Number (ITIN), which is the equivalent of SSN for foreign nationals not receiving wages. When he requested help from Rodrigue, she confirmed that he needed an ITIN, but did not lead him directly to the University’s online instructions for obtaining an ITIN through the OICT (though it is not clear whether he could have done so, since he missed the Nov. 15 deadline for this process in 2022).
The student tried calling the IRS for help, but the automated phone menu requested an SSN. On the IRS website, he found three ways to obtain an ITIN: mailing his documents to the IRS office in Texas, working with a certified public accountant, and scheduling an appointment at an IRS Taxpayer Assistance Center. Remembering how difficult it was to contact the IRS, the student chose the first option even though he risked losing his passport—his only form of U.S. identification—in the mail. Fortunately, he got it back.
A second anonymous student of the class of 2024 had trouble obtaining an SSN in June 2023. As required, she made an appointment with the Social Security Administration office in Middletown and requested that her SSN card be mailed to the OICT. Rodrigue alerted the student that she should have received a letter of confirmation after the appointment, but did not reply when the student, who was abroad for the summer, asked if someone could check her WesBox for the letter.
The letter never arrived. In late September 2023, the student emailed Rodrigue to ask if her Social Security card had arrived at the OICT. She received a reply 18 days later that it had not, and that the student needed to obtain an SSN in the next month or her University employment would be terminated. During her second, successful attempt to get an SSN, the member of the class of 2024 learned that the Middletown Social Security Administration office had no record of her first appointment.
“It was as if I had never been there,” the student said.
Although U.S. taxes are some of the lowest in the developed world, they are perhaps the most complicated. Americans spend about 6 billion hours in total—that’s about 18 hours per capita—each year on tax preparation. The very concept of a personal accountant is distinctly American. Who could benefit from this system, which seems so inefficient?
Politicians often use incentives, exceptions, and benefits to support particular activities—such as, for example, the recent continuation of the child tax credit in the House of Representatives—and the current tax code is the result of repeated changes over many years.
Tax preparation companies profit from people’s need for help with these laws, and companies such as Intuit, which owns TurboTax, have lobbied against government efforts to create free, simple systems for filing online. Internally, Intuit refers to any legal simplification of the tax code as encroachment; a 2014–2015 lobbying plan is titled “Encroachment Strategy.”
With U.S. taxes unlikely to become simpler, it seems that the University remains unable to monitor and assist with each student’s tax forms.
Some students wish the University could hire more staff to hold regular, accessible office hours. An anonymous first-year suggested an event for students to gather and fill out their tax forms together, possibly with volunteer help from students who feel familiar with the tax code. Ebihara suggested that the University could emphasize the importance of tax compliance and introduce students to the process through a targeted meeting at International Student Orientation.
Students also wondered if the University could provide contact information for certified public accountants, in case of especially challenging situations or tax-related threats to students’ legal status. Others pointed out the University’s positive marketing of support systems and scholarship programs for international students, noting a discrepancy between vague offers of support and an inability to comment on the most difficult aspect of students’ finances.
“I know that [Rodrigue is] just doing her job, and she has a lot of legal limitations,” the anonymous member of the class of 2023 said. “But I wish she would be more upfront about that. She poses [as] this helpful, full-time staff worker at Wesleyan, trying to make sure that everyone remains on legal status, but then when you do reach out to her, she’s unhelpful. I think if she’s just more honest with what she can and can’t help students with from the get-go, that would be less frustrating.”
Anne Kiely can be reached at afkiely@wesleyan.edu.