Maria Dykstra (not her real name) is a single mother who struggles to make ends meet. She works two jobs and receives no child support. Because she spends her time working and caring for three children, she has neither the hours nor the energy to determine whether she’s eligible for food stamps or other government programs. For Dykstra, putting food on the table for tonight’s dinner is the important thing; planning for tomorrow is more than she has time for.

H&R Block is changing all that. The company’s mission is to serve as a trusted financial partner for its clients, more than half of whom are part of lower-income families. For many lower-income families, meeting financial needs means incorporating government benefits into their plans to ensure financial well being. In many cases, those benefits can make up 20 to 30 percent of their total income.

H&R Block has been in the tax preparation business for more than 50 years. Over the past decade, the company and its employees have worked hard to expand their reach beyond tax preparation to providing a broader set of financial services and advice for the more than 20 million clients they serve. “We serve about 13 million families whose adjusted gross income at a household level is less than $35,000 per year,” says Bernie Wilson, vice president of outreach and business development for H&R Block. “We realized that government benefits can represent a significant portion of a family’s income, but that many eligible families weren’t taking advantage of available benefits. We realized that if we were going to go all the way and help our clients save for the long term, we needed to help maximize their income.”

To do so, H&R Block employees needed to determine how to increase clients’ access to and enrollment in government benefits programs. “Not only are the financial pressures on a low-income family heavy,” says John Thompson, assistant vice president of outreach and business development for H&R Block, “the process of getting the available benefits is difficult and time-consuming, with lots of obstacles.”

H&R Block has a distribution system of thousands of offices around the country, and a considerable number of low-income families already walk through the company’s doors on an annual basis. “We are in a unique position to help low-income families become aware of government programs and help them collect potential benefits more efficiently,” says Thompson.

Adds Wilson, “We believe that the financial outlook of a low-income family can be dramatically improved and that people can become financially successful with just a little help.” H&R Block wanted to simplify the government program application process for its clients so that they could receive the benefits for which they were eligible. The company’s employees wanted to help clients deal with a process that is known to be complex, time-consuming, and difficult to complete.

According to Wilson, there are very few financial services businesses that have enterprisewide structures and processes that directly apply to lower-income Americans. “We see a real business opportunity to take our company’s success and experience with e-filed tax forms and translate it into a way to ensure that all the various financial services are made available to the clients who need them. And we needed to do so efficiently at reduced costs,” says Wilson.

Wilson, Thompson, and their H&R Block colleagues realized that, with the right systems to support them during the e-filing process, the company’s Tax Professionals could alert clients to available benefits, screen them for those benefits, and then help them with their applications. “In our current tax preparation process, we already collect a significant portion of the necessary data for determining whether someone is eligible,” says Wilson. “We realized that if we took that process just a few steps further we could help clients more quickly and successfully apply for benefits.”

Continues Wilson, “At the same time, we could help government agencies reduce their own costs for enrolling people for those services.” Government agencies, particularly those serving inner-city neighborhoods, seek to improve the financial situations of their constituents, many of whom are H&R Block clients. Wilson spoke with a multitude of state and county leaders to help H&R Block better understand their challenges and identify opportunities to streamline the processes.

Wilson and his colleagues began to work with various foundations and other nonprofit organizations to determine how best to promote low-income family self-sufficiency. “We wanted to learn from the experienced, respected organizations within the communities serving the low-income population in order to help families recognize the need to save—and to help create opportunities for them to do so,” says Wilson.

H&R Block turned to trusted Microsoft Certified Business Solutions Partner Nets to Ladders (N2L) to help develop a platform for benefits screening and enrollment, and then integrate it into the existing tax office practices. The result was the Benefits Enrollment Network, a pilot system that Tax Professionals can use to guide low-income clients through the benefits enrollment process. The system is built on Microsoft Dynamics CRM 3.0 business management software. “The idea is to work with partners to build an electronic filing system for government benefits, similar to what was built for electronically filing tax information with the Internal Revenue Service, and to offer comparable guidance throughout the process,” explains Wilson.

The pilot project’s goals are to increase awareness and use of government benefits by the target population. Thompson and Wilson also wanted to determine how much more efficient and easy they can make it for state, county, and municipal agencies to receive and process client applications.

Wilson and Thompson also needed to be sure that adding the Benefits Enrollment Network wouldn’t add too much extra time to Tax Professionals’ days during the busy tax season. “We made ease of use a priority for the system so that it wouldn’t be a burden on our people and their time with each client,” says Thompson. “We needed a utility that our Tax Professionals could just ‘get’ and that would maximize their efficiency. That’s why we chose to base everything on Microsoft technologies and partners—we knew we would end up with a comfortable, familiar environment for our users.”

H&R Block and N2L designed the Benefits Enrollment Network to be as straightforward as possible. “One of the things that we can’t afford is for our company’s technology to be complicated,” says Thompson. “We already spend 160 hours per year teaching our people about taxes and how to use our existing programs, so anything we added had to be relatively effortless to use.”

During the 2007 tax season, more than 500 individual Tax Professionals participated and several thousand clients were exposed to the process. “There is no template within commercial America for what we’re doing,” says Thompson. “So we had to get out into the field and test our ideas in multiple states over a few business cycles. Once we’re satisfied with the pilot program, we’ll give the adjusted solution to a launch team to scale it up and deploy it companywide to a significant portion of our 100,000 seasonal Tax Professionals.”

Previously, government employees or those from nonprofit organizations helped clients fill out forms by hand and then transferred those forms to the appropriate office, where the information had to be entered manually. Today, H&R Block Tax Professionals proceed with their usual process of collecting and entering clients’ tax information. The system automatically notifies them if a client may be eligible for additional government benefits. After the Tax Professionals fill out digitized forms, the forms are then automatically distributed into the current processes with the appropriate government agencies. H&R Block continues to work with multiple parties to develop the type of end-to-end integration that will enable increased system efficiencies.

H&R Block is extending its relationships with low-income families by adhering to the company’s mission: to help improve the lives of its clients. Through innovation, the company is making a real difference for those clients. “Because our current processes are designed to help our clients access discretionary income, we believe creating the capability to allow them to access government benefits in the same way is a logical extension of our mission,” says Wilson. “Furthermore, eliminating compulsory barriers that today prohibit access and increase uncertainty can create the needed stability to allow families to stay on track in the short term in order to achieve their long-term goals.”

By helping clients gain access to government benefits, Tax Professionals from H&R Block are expanding their value to clients. “Through the introduction of this program, H&R Block will become that much more relevant to our clients, thus increasing client retention by enhancing relationships with our existing clients and helping us develop new client relationships,” says Wilson.

Through the Benefits Enrollment Network, the company’s Tax Professionals are able to heighten client awareness of benefits and navigate complex processes for their clients. H&R Block may even be able to extend the program beyond government benefits to include other services. Tax Professionals may conduct annual reviews with their clients and then, if necessary, refer them to specific partners, such as those that provide assistance for childcare or transportation services. “We have already witnessed our Tax Professionals serving as much more comprehensive partners to our clients,” says Thompson. “The Benefits Enrollment Network is simply extending that capability.”

When low-income families request government benefits, the traditional enrollment process can take more than a month. Wilson believes that using the Benefits Enrollment Network can considerably shorten the time that the families have to spend dealing with the application process as well as the time spent by an agency worker. He says, “We believe that we can compress the timeframe so that clients will be considered for the appropriate programs in days rather than weeks.”

Much of that reduction comes from successfully streamlining the screening and application process through automation. “The system stops the workflow process right away if there is an error or omission,” says Thompson. “The application can’t be e-filed until the problem is corrected, so we can reduce delays associated with data input errors and missing data. The goal is for benefits to reach families faster, and for agencies to realize time—and therefore cost—efficiencies.”

Tax Professionals now have comprehensive client information at their fingertips. “It’s easy for me to pull up information, such as how many times someone has called and what services we’ve performed in the past,” says Leena Desai, Tax Professional for H&R Block. “Clients appreciate that they don’t have to repeat their stories and that it takes just a moment to check what else they may be eligible for. It takes no more than 20 minutes to guide them through the application process and electronically file their applications with the appropriate agencies. It’s a positive experience for us and for our clients.”

Thanks to the Benefits Enrollment Network, Maria Dykstra now has the food stamps and medical coverage that she needs to keep her children healthy. H&R Block, in turn, has a client who has seen real value from her relationship with the company—a relationship that’s likely to continue for many years to come.