Assistance program
Volunteer Income Tax Assistance (VITA) Matching Grant Program
$245.8 Million committed in FY2018–FY2026
- Agency
- Internal Revenue Service, Treasury, Department of the
- Assistance
- Project Grants
- CFDA number
- 21.009
- What it does
- This grant authorizes the Internal Revenue Service to provide a matching grant to private or non-profit organizations providing free tax return preparation through the IRS Volunteer Income Tax Assistance (VITA) program; extending VITA services to underserved populations and hardest-to-reach areas, both urban and non-urban. Specific goals include increase the capacity to file returns electronically, heighten quality control, enhance training of volunteers, and significantly improve the accuracy rate of returns prepared by VITA sites.
- Who benefits
- Helping low-income individuals and families, elderly, rural, persons with disabilities, Native American, limited English proficient and military individuals and family.
- Who applies
- Applicants must have experience in operating a Volunteer Income Tax Assistance program.
- Authorized by
- Public Law 116-25
Committed by fiscal year
* FY2026 is year-to-date — the fiscal year is still in progress, so its total is still filling in. The striped band and dashed line mark that provisional stretch.
Top recipients
By dollars committed.
How to read these numbers
- Committed through this program
Money committed under this assistance listing (its CFDA program), counted in the year each action happened.
- How it's paid
Most programs pay out one way — a grant, or a direct payment to individuals; the flow bar only appears when a program genuinely mixes types.
- Some recipients aren't itemized
For entitlement programs like Social Security and Medicare, the government reports one aggregate instead of naming tens of millions of people, so the recipient roster isn't part of the public record.
- Awards, counted once
An award count is the number of distinct awards with at least one action that year — each counted once, however many times it was amended.
- The colored bars
Every bar on this page splits by how the money moves:
Direct payments