Susan Senator

Here is something for employers to think about. There are tax incentives granted by the US federal government for those who hire people who traditionally have faced great barriers to finding work: The Work Opportunity Tax Credit. This existed in a different form before, as the Targeted Jobs Tax Credit Program. This is a quote from Worksupport.com, my source:

Employers electing the credit must reduce the wage deduction on their business tax return by the amount of the Work Opportunity Tax Credit taken. Unlike the wage deduction, WOTC is applied against an employer’s bottom-line liability and offsets taxes due on a dollar-for-dollar basis.

I learned this because I had asked one of my favorite autism adulthood gurus Peter Gerhardt if he knew of such a thing. I also have wondered if autistic people can invoke Affirmative Action to help them get hired, to make the playing field more even. Peter said that the closest thing to this, however, is the ADA (Americans with Disabilities Act) that makes it illegal to discriminate against those with disabilities when hiring or in the workplace.

This program may be common knowledge but I suspect that it wouldn’t hurt to tell people about it a few thousand times.