Assessing What We Owe the Government—and One Another
March 25, 2025
An interview with Board Member Tom Scott about his experience offering tax preparation advice for international students
At a school where students spiritedly discuss ontological realities, there’s one truth about which few would argue: Paying taxes isn’t fun. But for international students, that routine if undesired task is made woefully more complicated by the U.S. tax code’s arcane rules. Last week, Garrett board member Tom Scott met with international students to discuss their unique challenges when preparing 2024 returns—helping to demystify the process and ensure that students are receiving the best deal possible while remaining fully compliant to IRS requirements. “The best way we can be welcoming as an institution is to walk with people side by side,” Scott tells me. “One of life’s biggest surprises is completing your tax form and finding out you owe a big sum of money, so it’s very important to think about what you owe in advance because the rules for international students are so different.”
If tax preparation is hard enough for U.S. citizens that it frequently garners laughs in standup comedy, non-citizen taxpayers’ process is enough to make you weep. “International students are subject to very different rules regarding how much of their income is taxed and what forms they need to file,” Scott explains. “Under tax laws, they may be characterized as nonresident taxpayers, but some are characterized as resident taxpayers, and still others are considered dual status taxpayers.” This status is determined by a convoluted metric that involves factors like what type of visa the student has, the visas they’ve held in the past, and the duration of all U.S. stays dating back to childhood. And that’s just the calculus that determines what forms the student fills out, let alone the expertise needed to complete them! “If you use any of the popular tax software programs, for example, they won’t even bother to ask you about this stuff,” Scott notes. “So, you could easily fill out the wrong tax return.”
To reduce confusion and minimize the likelihood that students make an error when filing their returns, Scott offered hands-on training where students brought their questions. He comes to this work with more than fifteen years of experience doing volunteer income tax preparation for low-income families. “In a typical year, about 25% of those are immigrants,” he notes. “I just love working with immigrant families and immigrant students—I love the energy, the courage, the sense of hope for what the future can hold. It’s one of the most personally rewarding things that I do in life.” Offering these services at Garrett holds particular reverence, though. In addition to serving on the board, Scott was baptized in Howe’s Chapel, and his family’s story has intertwined with the seminary’s story for generations—this tax initiative is just one new chapter.
It’s also an expression of Scott’s Christian faith. “I’m following the biblical command to love your neighbor and welcome the stranger,” he says simply. “Jesus calls me to live my life in a way that’s responsive to his teachings.” As vitriol and controversy over migrants’ lives swirls in Washington D.C., it’s also his way of focusing on what he can control. “The number one thing I can do is focus on where I can make the world around me better,” he says. “It’s why I deliberately seek out tax prep, and why I serve on the board of Northern Illinois Justice for Our Neighbors.” Instead of believing any delusion that he alone can solve the world’s problems, he identifies where he can make significant difference. “Jesus called us grains of salt,” he says. “Salt isn’t the dish. It’s a little thing that makes the whole dish better. He talked about us as mustard seeds—mustard seed isn’t the plant, it’s just the start of something.”
Similarly, last week’s session is just the start of how Scott envisions Garrett can help international students better prepare to file their taxes. “We have a real opportunity to be more proactive, more welcoming, more planful with our students in a way that gets them ready for what will then happen six months later when they have to sit down in a room and fill out a tax return,” he says. By helping students more accurately fill out their withholding tax forms for their job income and create plans for how they will handle the taxes on other types of income, Scott hopes to create a culture at Garrett where no student receives a surprise bill in April.
Visible joy fills Scott’s face when he discusses these plans, the kind of fulfillment that comes from living out one’s religious principles and giving back to an institution that seeds so much good in the world. “A gift to Garrett is one of the most impactful investments anybody could make anywhere because of how it ripples many decades into the future through the lives of the students we help form,” he notes. “Whether you are training somebody to minister in a local church, serve as an academic or professor, or work in a community organizer, these are enormously impactful vocations.” His work is also a reminder that, while making a financial contribution is an incredibly meaningful way to support Garrett’s mission, there are many other ways to give. “The biblical call is to offer every ounce of who we are and what we have,” he concludes. “Money is simply a part of that because we’re also stewards of our talents, our personal energies, and our life experiences. What’s important is to offer the support you can and do so with a passion.”