Graduate students want tax removed

May petition Philadelphia City Council Graduate students are gearing up to fight City Hall. At the Graduate Student Associations Council meeting last week, talk focused on petitioning City Council to remove the city's wage tax on graduate student income. Graduate students are upset over a memo sent out last month by the University's comptroller saying that tax withholding would be collected on all payments to teaching assistants and research fellows who provide "any services" to the University beginning January 1. The comptroller's office sent the memo in response to a May audit by the city which found the University had neglected to withhold $1.5 million in wage taxes since 1989. GSAC tax committee member Nigel Nicholson said the petition drive mainly focuses on the new taxation of research fellows, because their wages had not been taxed in the past. Graduate students are also upset that the city continues to tax TAs' earnings. Only wages earned toward satisfying teaching requirements are exempt. Because most of the money research fellows earn is for research in the sciences and not for service to the University, Nicholson argues that it does not fit into the University's tax mold. "These are really non-service fellowships," he said. "And another $600 a year off your fellowship is a lot of money." Nicholson added that Pennsylvania levies no state taxes on the wages of graduate research fellows. Students at the meeting last week said they were concerned that the city was becoming a financially inhospitable environment for research. Ed Baptist, GSAC treasurer and history graduate student, said the new tax may translate into an aversion to the University for students looking for a place to do graduate work. "At about $50 a month, [the tax] makes Penn that much less attractive to prospective students," Baptist said. "It appears that Penn is now the only major research university located in a city that has a wage tax." Baptist said he hopes that City Council, when it sees petitions from a large number of registered voters, will decide to address the graduate students' tax problems. In the meantime, affected students will have to start budgeting for the upcoming wage tax. Nicholson, a classics graduate student, said he thinks taxing students will not be an effective policy for the city in the long run.