Question-and-Answer Session
Operator
Your first question comes from John Healy - FTN Midwest Securities
John Healy – FTN Midwest Securities
Bigger picture question on the industry, this is the second tax season in a row where it seems the industry is shifting more towards the later season and we’re a bit surprised that this continues to take place especially in light of what some people believe is economic pressures and things tightening out there. I was hoping to just get some more color from you guys, what you’re hearing from your franchisees and how you look at the industry on why this shift is occurring and if you were surprised that the shift continued even this year with the economic situation as it is.
Michael Yerington
John, we’ve seen this happening over the last three to four years and I think we kind of expected as you might of, that with people being a little more tight from a cash flow standpoint they might have filed earlier in the season but that continues to happen. We don’t see that changing anytime in the foreseeable future and don’t know all the reasons behind it but I think that people are maybe at this early stage of potentially an economic downturn they’re still feeling okay about being able to file a little bit later.
John Healy – FTN Midwest Securities
And when you guys talked about the factors you cited as having an impact on the early season, is there any way to kind of put the numbers behind those, maybe how much was just a shift, how much you think was impacted by the media and how much was lost due to financial products.
Michael Yerington
Yes, let me just reiterate what those reasons were again. I don’t know if I can put a percentage behind each one of them. You know we mentioned before more returns are being filed later that’s certainly for our customers which tend to be early filers; January to February 15 we have a significant portion of our business in at that point. That’s certainly one factor. Lack of a preseason product, even though the preseason product was not there this year it is as we’ve said in the past a very good retention tool for us and when we had pre file as a standalone by ourselves in 2006 it was a significant attracter of new customers as well. We think the independence filing with paystubs, when we did pre file a couple of years back it was because we knew there was a need for our customers who are usually in a tight financial situation to get money quickly. And we saw it in the marketplace that there were people out there filing tax returns based on paystubs instead of W-2s, so we created a legal alternative which was called Pre File. And when Pre File went away I think the need for those products still existed and I think we’ve fallen back into the old pattern that we had before Pre File was introduced where people are now going to less focused, I guess less focused but people who are not as focused on quality tax returns and I think they’re filing with a paystub. And I think that’s been evident this season.
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