Advisory Committee Meeting

February 25, 2014New America Foundation

Washington, D.C.

Refund Savings

Welcome

Dear esteemed advisory committee and guests:

Welcome to the advisory committee meeting on the Refund to Savings (R2S) initiative. Developed by Washington University, Duke University, and Intuit, Inc., R2S is working to create and test low-touch, innovative, and scalable interventions that leverage existing platforms and structures to build savings and improve household economic security. In 2013, R2S launched the largest saving experiment, in terms of sample size, ever conducted in the United States.

We are fortunate to have such an esteemed group of leaders from industry, policy making, and academia. We will share with you our newest evidence from the 2013 randomized, controlled trial in TurboTax and from the detailed longitudinal household financial survey. The findings from the R2S initiative provide crucial evidence on tax-time saving behavior, factors that motivate financial decision making, and the impact of refund-saving interventions on household balance sheets. In the meeting, we will discuss plans for the future implementation of R2S tests. We will also consider how our work can inform current policy discussions and initiatives related to financial security and mobility among low-income households.

We are excited to have you in the room and believe that you will make a valuable contribution to the discussion.

Sincerely,

Michal Grinstein-WeissAssociate Professor,Associate Director, CSDWashington University in St. Louis

Dan ArielyJames B. Duke Professor of Psychology & Behavioral EconomicsDuke University

Phillip PoirierVice President, Government, Consumer DivisionIntuit, Inc.

Agenda

Tuesday, February 25, 2014

11:00-11:10 a.m.

11:10-11:30 a.m.

11:30 a.m.-12:15 p.m.

12:15-12:30 p.m.

12:30-1:10 p.m.

1:10-1:45 p.m.

1:45-2:00 p.m.

Welcome and IntroductionsMichal Grinstein-Weiss, Phil Poirier, and Dan Ariely

Presentation of select Refund to Savings (R2S) research resultsBlair Russell and Krista Comer

Discussion Question 1 - What financial capability innovations might our R2S testing focus on?Jennifer Tescher, Amy Brown, and Keith Ernst

Break

Working lunch

Discussion Question 2 - What do the Treasury Department and CFPB need to know, and what can R2S help answer, to move the policy agenda forward?Rourke O’Brien and Julian Jamison

Discussion Question 3 - What are the current policy and product opportunities related to financial security and tax time? Ray Boshara, Reid Cramer, Phil Poirier, and Dave Williams

Wrap UpMichal Grinstein-Weiss and Phil Poirier

Meeting Participants

Dan ArielyDespite our intentions, why is it that we so often fail to act in our own best interest? Why do we promise to skip the chocolate cake, only to find ourselves drooling our way into temptation when the dessert tray rolls around? Why do we overvalue things that we’ve worked to put together? What are the forces that influence our behavior? Dan Ariely, James B. Duke Professor of Psychology & Behavioral Economics at Duke University, is dedicated to answering these questions and others in order to help people live more sensible – if not rational – lives. His interests span a wide range of behaviors, and his sometimes unusual experiments are consistently interesting, amusing and informative, demonstrating profound ideas that fly in the face of common wisdom.

In addition to appointments at the Fuqua School of Business, the Center for Cognitive Neuroscience, the Department of Economics, and the School of Medicine at Duke University, Ariely is also a founding member of the Center for Advanced Hindsight, and the author of Predictably Irrational and The Upside of Irrationality.

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Ray BosharaRay Boshara is senior adviser and assistant vice president at the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, where he also directs the Center for Household Financial Stability. The center conducts research on family balance sheets and how they matter for strengthening families and the economy. Before joining the Fed in April 2011, Boshara was vice president of the New America Foundation, a D.C.-based think tank, where he launched and directed programs promoting asset development, college savings, financial inclusion and a new social contract.

Over the past 20 years, Boshara has advised presidential candidates; the George W. Bush, Bill Clinton and Barack Obama administrations; and leading policymakers worldwide. He has testified before the U.S. Congress several times, most recently before the Senate Banking Committee in October 2011. Boshara has written for The Washington Post, The New York Times, The Atlantic Monthly, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch and Democracy. His media appearances include National Public Radio, Marketplace, CNBC, C-SPAN and Bloomberg News. His book, The Next Progressive Era, co-authored with Phillip Longman, was published in 2009. Boshara is a graduate of Ohio State University, Yale Divinity School and the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard.

Amy Brown Amy Brown’s work focuses on providing financial services for low-income households in the United States. Her grant making supports developing affordable and appropriate financial products and services; building an infrastructure to expand access to financial products and services; and engaging in policy advocacy to promote responsible regulation and consumer protection. Before joining the Ford Foundation in 2010, Brown was a senior consultant to the Aspen Institute’s Economic Opportunities Program and also consulted with a diverse roster of clients including the Annie E. Casey Foundation, Center for the Study of Social Policy, Center for Financial Services Innovation, Federal Reserve and Children’s Defense Fund.

Brown has also held positions as director of income policy for the Community Food Resource Center, where she launched and managed a large-scale Earned Income Tax Credit campaign; senior associate at MDRC, where she directed technical assistance related to welfare reform; professional staff member at the U.S. Senate Agriculture Committee, where she worked on Food Stamp, child nutrition and health care legislation; and executive director of Neighbors Together Corporation, where she managed emergency food, health care and AIDS education programs for residents of Brownsville in Brooklyn, N.Y. Brown earned a BA in art history from Columbia College and an MS in public administration from Columbia University.

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Krista Comer Krista Comer is a Program Manager at the Center for Social Development (CSD) at Washington University in St. Louis. Her work focuses primarily on developing and testing asset building and savings initiatives for economically vulnerable individuals and families. Her interests also include grassroots community development, participatory democracy, and quality affordable housing. Prior to joining CSD, Comer worked with the Asset-Building Research Group at the University of North Carolina. Comer received her Master’s Degree in City and Regional Planning at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and holds a BA in social work from the University of Iowa in Iowa City.

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Keith ErnstKeith Ernst has served as Associate Director for Consumer Research and Examination Support in the Division of Depositor and Consumer Protection since February 2011, extending a career that has spanned the intersection of research, policy, and banking issues. His responsibilities include oversight of original consumer research, including the agency’s work to provide estimates of unbanked and underbanked U.S. households. He also manages consumer exam-related analytic functions such as the development of statistical models to evaluate fair lending concerns. He joined the FDIC from the Center for Responsible Lending, a nationally-recognized research and policy organization, where he served as Director of Research. He has extensive experience overseeing consumer research, and his own work has informed the development of consumer protection laws and regulations. His work has been published in various academic journals and presented at conferences, industry events, as well as to Congress and regulatory agencies. He also has analytic experience in secondary mortgage market operations. He is a graduate of Hofstra University and holds both an MS in public policy studies and a J.D. from Duke University.

Reid CramerReid Cramer is Director of the Asset Building Program at the New America Foundation, which aims to promote policies and ideas that significantly broaden access to economic resources. Previously, he served as the program’s Research Director and as a Co-Director of the New America Foundation’s Next Social Contract Initiative, an effort to examine the delivery of social policy for the 21st century. Cramer’s work has provided analytical support for the development of a range of policy proposals, including the ASPIRE Act, a bipartisan proposal to create a savings account for every newborn child in America; AutoSave, a unique model that automatically diverts payroll into flexible savings accounts; and The Saver’s Bonus, which provides a targeted incentive to contribute to savings products at tax time. He is the author of the Assets Agenda and the Assets Report 2010, which respectively highlight innovative policy proposals and federal policy initiatives related to asset building opportunities. Prior to joining New America, Cramer served as a policy and budget analyst at the Office of Management and Budget, where he helped coordinate policies on housing, savings, economic development, and program performance evaluation. He has a PhD in public policy from the LBJ School of Public Affairs at the University of Texas at Austin, as well as an MS in city and regional planning from the Pratt Institute and a BA from Wesleyan University.

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Timothy Flacke Timothy Flacke is the Executive Director of Doorways to Dreams (D2D) Fund, a non-profit organization that strengthens the financial opportunity and security of low and moderate- income consumers by innovating, incubating and stimulating new financial products and policies. Flacke co-launched D2D in 2001 and has served on organization’s board of directors since that time, drawing on 20 years of experience in the non-profit and private sectors helping working people to build savings. He helped grow D2D from a start-up social venture to nationally recognized innovation incubator which partners with leading financial service firms and receives support from the world’s most respected philanthropic foundations. Flacke has directed signature D2D efforts, including the Refunds to Assets project linking federal tax refunds to savings and Online IDA, a scalable infrastructure for matched savings programs built on industry-leading 401(k) recordkeeping technology. These efforts have twice impacted the federal tax code and spawned new financial products and public policies responsible for helping hundreds of thousands of Americans to save tens of millions of dollars.

Before D2D, Flacke worked as an independent consultant, author and grant writer in the field of asset development, co-authoring The Individual Development Account (IDA) Program Design Handbook and Dollar $ense, a financial education curriculum.  He served as a VISTA volunteer in rural Vermont, and earlier in his career, held leadership positions in corporate human resources, risk management and shareholder relations for Filene’s Basement, Inc.  He holds an MS in Public Policy from the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University and a BA in Philosophy from Boston College.

Michal Grinstein-Weiss Michal Grinstein-Weiss is an Associate Professor at the George Warren Brown School of Social Work and the Associate Director at the Center for Social Development at Washington University in St. Louis. Grinstein-Weiss a leading researcher in the asset-building field and is an influential voice in the design of savings policies, both in the United States and internationally.

She is the Principal Investigator for a 10-year follow-up study of the American Dream Demonstration (ADD), the first large-scale test of Individual Development Accounts (IDAs). In addition, she is leading the Refund to Savings initiative, the largest savings experiment in the United States to date. The initiative builds on her work on innovative tax refund savings programs such as the $aveNYC program and it is a collaborative effort with leading behavioral economist Dan Ariely and Intuit, Inc. Grinstein-Weiss also serves as consultant to the Israeli government on developing innovative universal savings policies. In 2011, Grinstein-Weiss was selected as the winner of the Society for Social Work and Research Deborah K. Padgett Early Career Achievement Award. Her research has been supported by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, several leading national research centers, and numerous philanthropic foundations. 

Grinstein-Weiss received a PhD in Social Work at George Warren Brown School of Social Work at Washington University in St. Louis and an MS in economics from the University of Missouri, St. Louis.

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Clinton Key Clinton Key is the research officer with Pew’s Safe Checking in the Electronic Age Program, which investigates consumer protection practices and advocates policies that better safeguard and inform American checking account holders. As the lead on a robust research portfolio, Key develops and implements data collection and analysis strategies to create a better understanding of the transaction account market and how customers use accounts. The research highlights the strengths and weaknesses of current products and informs regulation to better protect consumers.

Prior to joining Pew, Key was the research director at the asset-building program at the University of North Carolina’s School of Social Work and a consultant for the Center for Social Development at Washington University in St. Louis. He designed field experiments and statistical investigations into the saving and consumption habits of American households and evaluated the effectiveness of programs designed to help families build savings and assets. He spoke and wrote on savings, household balance sheets, and research methods for a wide variety of audiences. Key holds a BS from the University of Chicago and an MS from the University of North Carolina.

Joe LillieJoe Lillie is Group Manager at Government for Intuit’s Consumer Group. In that role, he is responsible for a variety of government initiatives in our consumer tax and personal finance businesses including program management for the Refund to Savings project. Prior to this role, Lillie worked with Intuit’s prepaid card businesses and has been with Intuit for three years. Originally from Grand Rapids, Michigan, Lillie has a BA from University of Michigan.

Julian Jamison Julian Jamison is a behavioral economist who studies human decision-making, especially the interplay between information, preferences, and behavior. He is currently a Senior Economist in the Office of Research at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau in Washington, DC, as well as a research associate at Innovations for Poverty Action. Previous affiliations include Caltech, Northwestern, UC Berkeley, and the Boston Fed. He has also consulted for Lockheed-Martin, the World Bank, NASA, and the National Institutes of Health. Jamison’s research uses formal theoretical modeling, laboratory experiments, and field experiments to explore the interactions between individual preferences and circumstances on the one hand, and behaviors and outcomes on the other hand. For instance, he has analyzed how risk tolerance and patience affect such disparate constructs as sexual behavior or entrepreneurial success. He is particularly interested in methodological issues, such as understanding and measuring the notion of utility (subjective well-being) and how to identify mistakes. Travel for work and leisure has taken him to over 60 countries worldwide, including Liberia, Papua New Guinea, Moldova, South Sudan, and Vanuatu.

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Bernie McKayBernie McKay is Intuit’s Chief Public Policy Officer and Vice President for Corporate Affairs. In this role, Mr. McKay is Intuit’s senior officer responsible for government affairs, industry relations, global public policy, and national corporate philanthropy.

McKay joined Intuit in January 1998. Prior to that time, he served in a variety of capacities in both the private and public sectors. A former Vice President for AT&T, McKay served in government relations positions there in the corporate Public Affairs department, and later led the Emerging Global Markets business development group in AT&T Federal Systems. He also previously served as deputy director of Hewlett-Packard’s Washington Government Affairs office.

Prior to joining the private sector, McKay served in positions in the U.S. Department of Energy and the Environmental Protection Agency, and also previously served in the Rhode Island State Department of Health. Before joining government, McKay served in a number of staff and management positions in Presidential, Senatorial and Gubernatorial election campaigns

McKay holds a BA in Political Science from Providence College, and a MS in Business and Public Administration from Southeastern University. He studied business, government and international affairs at the University College of North Wales (UK), the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, INSEAD in Fontainebleau, France, and at the Indiana University School of Business.

McKay is a Board member of Computer and Communications Industry Association (CCIA), the Council for Electronic Revenue Communication Advancement (CERCA), the Software and Information Industry Association (SIIA), and the Washington Shakespeare Theatre.

Susan Mason As Director of the Intuit Financial Freedom Foundation, Mason oversees the Intuit Tax Freedom Project through which Intuit donates its popular TurboTax® Online program to taxpayers who meet eligibility criteria announced at the beginning of each tax season. The Foundation has donated more than 26 million state and federal returns to lower income and underserved taxpayers since 1998; first on its own and later through the IRS Free File program, a public/private partnerships between the IRS and tax software companies. She also directs initiatives to support small businesses starting and growing in disadvantaged communities, especially those owned by women and minorities. Prior to joining Intuit, Mason spent 20 years in the not-for-profit sector, first with United Way of America and later with MENTOR: The National Mentoring Partnership. Originally from Louisville, Kentucky, Mason has a BA in speech communications from Saint Mary’s College in Notre Dame, Indiana.  She also studied in London with Syracuse University’s Newhouse School of Communications.

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Preeti MehtaPreeti Mehta is Director of Project Incubation for D2D Fund. She currently leads the tax time savings work at D2D and created the original design for the Prize Linked Savings project “Save to Win” in Michigan. At D2D, Mehta has a particular interest in exploring social and psychological factors that affect savings behavior of low income consumers. Prior to joining D2D, Mehta was a management consultant in the private and nonprofit sectors, first with PricewaterhouseCoopers Management Consulting Services and then as a self-employed consultant, specializing in business process design, operations improvement and strategic planning. Her private sector clients included a range of Fortune 500 companies in several industries. In her capacity as consultant to the nonprofit sector, Mehta served as the Director of Economic Development for a local community-based organization. She also served on the Board of a Low Income, Community Development Credit Union. Prior to her consulting career, Mehta worked at GTE Laboratories in Waltham, MA. She holds an MS in Mathematics from Virginia Tech, in Blacksburg, VA, and a BS in Mathematics from St. Xavier’s college, Mumbai, India.

Melissa NetramFor the past 4 years, Melissa Netram has worked in Intuit’s Corporate Affairs department, responsible for tax and financial services issues from both a legislative and regulatory aspect. Among these issues are tax time savings, financial literacy, mobile payments, and small business financing.

Prior to Intuit, Netram worked at the Financial Services Roundtable, a financial services trade association comprised of representatives from the banking, insurance and securities sectors of the industry. At the Roundtable, she served as regulatory counsel and worked on legislative and regulatory issues affecting the financial services industry. There, Netram played a key role in actively lobbying and shaping the Roundtable’s legislative strategy regarding the Dodd-Frank Act. From 2003-2007, Melissa worked for The McGraw-Hill Companies. While originally focused on developing and shaping the corporation’s privacy policies, Metram moved into a lobbying role within a year. She lobbied primarily for Standard & Poor’s at a time when credit rating agencies were just starting to be regulated – and worked on the Credit Rating Reform Act of 2006. In addition, she worked on some energy initiatives due to McGraw-Hill’s Platts’ energy index.

Prior to McGraw-Hill, Metram worked at the U.S. Department of Treasury as a Presidential Management Intern (now referred to as Presidential Management Fellow). During this program, she rotated through the Office of Critical Infrastructure Protection and Compliance Policy, Office of Financial Institutions and GSE Policy, and in the Chief Counsel’s office of the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency. Netram received a J.D. from The Catholic University of America, Columbus School of Law and a BS in Business Administration from Villanova University. She is licensed to practice law in the State of Maryland.

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Rourke O’BrienRourke O’Brien is a Senior Policy Advisor for Consumer Policy at the US Department of the Treasury where he focuses on financial access and savings. He previously served as a policy analyst and research fellow with the Asset Building program at the New America Foundation and is currently a research associate with the US Financial Diaries project at NYU. O’Brien earned a BA from Harvard University and an MA from Princeton University where he is a doctoral candidate and National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellow. He is the coauthor of Taxing the Poor (UC Press 2011) and his work has appeared in academic journals and popular outlets including the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, and the Washington Post.

Phil Poirier Phil Poirier is Vice President, government, for Intuit’s Consumer Group. In that role, he is responsible for a variety of government initiatives in our consumer tax and personal finance businesses. He was recently Chair of the IRS Electronic Tax Administration Advisory Council (ETAAC), a congressionally mandated advisory board, for two years. Formerly, with Intuit, Poirier was Acting General Counsel for the company, and held a variety of legal and business development roles in several other Intuit businesses including professional tax software, accountant services, mid-market software and a regulated e-commerce insurance business. He is a licensed attorney and, prior to joining Intuit, was in private practice. He holds a J.D. from University of San Diego and a BS from the U.S. Naval Academy. He retired from the U.S. Navy Reserve with the rank of Captain.

Dana PerantieDana is a Program Manager at the Center for Social Development (CSD) at Washington University in St. Louis. Her work entails implementing research evaluations, and managing data and statistical analysis for research studies to promote financial well-being. Her interests include the intersection between health and wealth. Prior to working at the CSD, Perantie assisted with the management and analysis of medical research studies at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis. She received an MS in Public Health from Washington University in St. Louis, and a BS in Psychology from Louisiana State University.

David Rothstein David Rothstein joined NHSGC in 2013. As Director of Resource Development & Public Affairs, Rothstein is responsible for fund development, asset building projects, public affairs, and government relations. Rothstein has a BA in Political Science from John Carroll University and a MS in public policy from Kent State University. He has published dozens of research reports, editorials, and pieces of testimony on asset, housing, and consumer issues. Rothstein was awarded the Distinguished Activist Award from Greater Community Shares for his work against predatory lending. He was also awarded a Cleveland Mover and Shaker Award by the 20/30 Professional Association. Before joining NHSGC, Rothstein was at Project Director for Asset Building at Policy Matters Ohio where he started the Ohio CASH Coalition. He currently serves as a Research Fellow with The New America Foundation and is on the Board of the National Community Tax Coalition.

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Jennifer Tescher Jennifer Tescher is the President & CEO for the Center for Financial Services Innovation, which aims to transform the financial services experience in America in order to better serve underbanked consumers and help them achieve prosperity. Toward that goal, CFSI develops and distributes real-world tested research and strategy, provides funding to promising companies, and facilitates cross-sector business collaboration.

Tescher founded CFSI in 2004 and has since achieved notable success in raising the profile of underbanked access and asset-building as an objective for the industry. She has become a nationally known expert on this topic, with a monthly column in American Banker, frequent interviews and articles in the financial press, and major speaking engagements at a broad spectrum of industry and policy convenings. Tescher launched CFSI’s annual conference, produced in partnership with SourceMedia, which presents cutting edge thought leadership and showcases innovators, executives, and emerging companies in the financial services industries. Newly titled “Emerge: The Forum on Consumer Financial Services Innovation,” the conference agenda reflects CFSI’s understanding of the changing financial services market, offers a renewed focus on improving consumers’ financial health, and draws over 700 attendees each year.

Blair RussellBlair Russell is a Senior Research Analyst with the Center for Social Development. He joined the Center in August 2013 after completing his PhD in Public Policy at The Ohio State University. His research interests center on quantitative policy analysis and program evaluation across a number of substantive areas, including asset building, housing, economic development, and education. With CSD, Russell provides analytical support to a number of ongoing research projects.

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Dave Williams David Williams is Intuit’s Chief Tax Officer where he is responsible for tax strategy and planning for Intuit’s TurboTax division. He is also the Executive Director of Intuit’s Tax and Financial Center which focuses on consumer tax, financial and healthcare issues. Prior to joining Intuit, Williams had an extensive career in tax policy and tax administration beginning with more than a decade in the U.S. Senate in various roles including Assistant Director for Tax and Revenue on the U.S. Senate Budget Committee and Legislative Director for U.S. Senator Bill Bradley. Williams was Deputy Assistant Secretary for Legislative Affairs-Tax and Budget at the U.S. Treasury Department and then went on to a career at the IRS, first as Chief Communications Officer then Director of the Earned Income Tax Credit program. His last position at the IRS was Director of the newly established Return Preparer Office.

Beadsie Woo Beadsie Woo is a Senior Associate in the Center for Community and Economic Opportunity at the Annie E. Casey Foundation. Her work to increase financial stability for families and children focuses on strategies that facilitate asset development and protect asset holding, including those related to foreclosure. She is a co-author of Weathering the Recession: The Financial Crisis and Family Wealth Changes in Low-Income Neighborhoods, which examines at what happened to assets, debts and home equity for families living in low-income neighborhoods during the Great Recession, using data from the longitudinal Making Connec-tions Survey. Woo holds an AB in Economics from Davidson College, an MPP from Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, and earned her PhD in the Department of Economics from the University of North Carolina.

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Notes

Thank you to theseRefund to Savings supporters