‘‘But more importantly we estimate that we saved our military families more than $126,000 dollars that they would have otherwise had to spend in getting their taxes done,” said Carol Allison who heads the VITA program for Naval Support Activity South Potomac through the Dahlgren Fleet and Family Support Center.

The FFSC does returns for Navy, Marine and Air Force families Naval Support Facilities Dahlgren and Indian Head as well as for Army families at Fort A.P. Hill.

Allison is faithfully helped annually by Steven Wisener of NSF Indian Head to prepare the returns. But the pair also relies heavily on military volunteers for the program each year, and in 2008 FC1 Gary Callahan, FCC Timothy Goodwin, FC1 Stephen Fleming, FC2 Francisco McGee, FC2 Chelsea McKillips, and HM2 Holly Bradford stepped forward.

‘‘Some were allowed by their commands to spend work time here with the taxes but all will give freely of their after-hour evenings, off time, and even some weekends,” Allison said. ‘‘All of them go through training and take a standardized IRS (Internal Revenue Service) test to get them ready to prepare the returns. In each return that we do, we have it double checked as one person prepares the return and another checks over it for accuracy,” she said. ‘‘We also do every state return too.”

Some of the tax returns can become complicated.

‘‘We’ve had to deal with looking at things such as farm property, rental property, stock dividends and bonds, and side jobs, such as Mary Kay sales that spouses may be doing,” Allison said. ‘‘There’s also combat pay and overseas pay that comes into impact some of the state returns that we do. As well, when they have side jobs, we offer a lot in the way of education about record keeping, gas mileage, and that sort of things...we want them to get every benefit from their return possible because a lot of the times people just don’t realize what they can deduct from their returns.”

This tax year also marked somewhat of a milestone for Allison as she reached 15 years of service doing taxes for military families.

‘‘I’ve come a long way from pencils, paper forms and calculators,” she remarked.