ITax Group Finds Credit Where Credit Is Due

Every year, companies fail to collect hundreds of thousands,and in some cases millions,of dollars from state and federal job tax credit programs. The reason is that companies are unaware of the programs, or they think the paper-based, manual process of collecting from the government is too bothersome, said Wayne Neale, vice president of marketing at ITax, based here.

The company's product, JobCredits, tracks about 150 different state and federal tax credit programs available for employing people in welfare-to-work or food-stamp programs, youth programs or in certain economically disadvantaged geographical areas. ITax primarily targets retail and services companies,industries that typically have high turnover rates.

"Those organizations are seeing 100 percent, 150 percent, and one of our customers has more than 300 percent turnover," he said.

What's more, 90 percent of applicants don't qualify for the tax credits, he said. "Imagine going through all those people manually to find that 10 percent," he said. "Instead, we automate the process so the people that are fed to them are only those qualified."

ITax is developing partnerships with companies that have complementary offerings, such as Unicru, a Beaverton, Ore.-based vendor of hiring management systems.

A kiosk deployed by Unicru at a customer's site captures applicants' information, including tax-credit eligibility via JobCredits. Unicru's system performs a background check, rates the candidate and either e-mails or faxes the application to the employer.

"We were working with a dozen tax accountants for five years in the U.S., and they were only automated for federal [job credit programs," said Cheryl Dallner, alliance partner manager at Unicru. "The ones we were working with couldn't figure out how to automate the state and local credit process. We found that ITax was the only one that could truly capture federal, state and local [programs electronically."

Neale said the tax credits received by a typical retailer usually cover the cost of a hiring management system.

ITax is in talks with other hiring management and recruiting software vendors. The company also wants to introduce a program for VARs. "They are the ones recommending the products, and we want to be on that list," Neale said.