Dennis Matthews’ life is unrecognizable since he enrolled in the IDA program. In 1999, Dennis was $10,000 in debt, had lost his job and had taken a new job with a 45% salary reduction. “I was in so much trouble,” he says. “The cost of living was so high.”

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“By filing my taxes, I’ve been able to invest in my business like never before.” -Deserae Mace-Runyon  Self-employed childcare business owner, Delaware

Launched in 2005, SETI is a project of CFED and the National Fund for Enterprise Development (NFED), a subsidiary corporation of CFED which is certified as a community development financial institution (CDFI).

Three factors spurred CFED-NFED to launch SETI:

First, a growing awareness that the microenterprise movement, which has been serving the self-employed community for 20 years, needed to learn more about how federal and state tax systems could be used to deliver direct support to micro-businesses.

Second, recognition that community and free tax preparation programs, which focus on tax preparation for low-income households, were serving a large segment of low-income taxpayer-customers that had self-employment income.  Many of these free tax preparation programs developed post-tax day self-employment training curriculum and had, in effect, become microenterprise training programs even though they knew little about the microenterprise industry.

Third, and perhaps most important, while a small proportion (200,000 out of 10 million) of the total micro-business customer base applies for microloans or seeks microenterprise training programs, all 10 million of those micro-business customers must interface with the tax code -- one way or another.  As a result, self-employment tax preparation is a tool for reaching this much larger, "built-in" customer base.

Learn more of SETI Overview