Community Exchange

At Indian River State College, we do not have a huge population of students required to pay NRA taxes.  We maintain our records on a spreadsheet throughout the year to track the total by student.  The 1042 forms are prepared manually and mailed to the address of record.

We are a smaller institutions that issues around 100 student forms and about 20 vendor forms each year.  We created reports within our enterprise system to calculate and track the income subject to 1042S reporting.  For the foreign students, that involved developing a report which is downloadable to excel that compares total aid posted to the student account versus qualified charges - the difference being nonqualified aid received by the student.  We calculate the related tax on that income 3 times annually (for Spring, Summer and Fall sessions) and remit the tax on the students' behalf.  At year-end, we provide the relevant information to our outside tax consultants in their required excel format, and they issue the forms and file with the IRS on our behalf.

Hi Melissa! We do a fair amount of this each year. You can search Colorado College's website for "International tax FAQs"  which gives a lot of our info. We use a software called Sprintax Calculus that students fill out and it determines the tax treaty, if any. First of March we upload student data and the software creates the 1042 forms that students can download or transfer to Sprintax Returns, plus it creates our return. The biggest issue is keeping track that student properly fill out Calculus, that we capture all types of income (prizes/awards, taxable scholarships, compensation); that is done manually on a spreadsheet with our starting point being the list of international students admitted.

At tax time, they use the software called Sprintax Returns. We give them a code for a free federal return, but they must pay for the state return. We run 3 workshops for the students where they can fill out their returns and we are available for help.

There is another alternative called Glacier; both are supposed to be pretty user-friendly.

We also use Sprintax Calculus at Brigham Young University. We issue about 1,000 forms per year. As with any software, there are pros and cons of using Sprintax. I'll echo Stacy Pons' comment, the hardest part of using an outside software is getting the students logged in and trained on how to properly update their residency information. We track all payments to int'l student outside of Sprintax and import the information into the software at filing time. We also use Sprintax to file the university's Form 1042. Sprintax does help with treaty claims on scholarships, which I love since it's so difficult to track that manually. We do not provide any help with tax return filing as we have a non-resident VITA lab on campus which is run by our Int'l Student Services department, but we do buy a limited number of free filing codes that allow students to file their federal tax return for free.   

Hello, Melissa, 

We are a small community college in Northern Wyoming and we also use Sprintax Calculus to help with processing international student income tax withholding. I would echo the previous comments about the challenges of getting the students to complete the information on their Sprintax record.  The most difficult seems to be their list of visits to the US.  Recently  I found that the students can look up a travel history on the U.S. Customs and Border Protection Website.  I just have them search "I94" and it's usually the first result.  From the home page of that website, they can click the View Travel History link and enter their name, date of birth, passport number and country the passport was issued from.  That will provide a list of entry and departure dates and locations.  We have a lot of Canadian students who go back and forth across the border many times.  This listing is not always perfect, but very helpful for that process!  You might just note that it only gives the travel history tied to that passport number.  If they have had prior passports, the history will not be complete unless they also search on those prior passport numbers. So far, my students have only had one passport in their lifetime, so this access to their I94 has been really helpful to them.

As far as our process for issuing the 1042-S, I let Sprintax do that.  Initially I tracked the information outside of Sprintax and then uploaded it in January or early February to the Sprintax Calculus tool and let that system generate the forms.  Recently I've started using the payment entry module that comes with Sprintax Calculus.  It's fairly simple and, hopefully, will make the 1042-S process even more streamlined next year.