Annie Lewis, a nurses’s aide at Buffalo General Hospital for the past 35 years, is a typical underpaid health care worker. Over these three-plus decades, Ms. Lewis has raised her children, some of her grandchildren, and currently her six-year-old niece, Nadia, without ever making more than $29,000 a year.

Each spring, she would pay H&R Block to do her taxes. She was never informed about the Earned Income Tax Credit, which provides a refundable income tax credit for low and moderate income working individuals and families. One of the federal government’s best kept secrets is the EITC.

In 2007, Ms. Lewis’s union, 1199 SEIU, began a program in Buffalo that provided its low-wage members with free EITC counseling. “Until then, I knew nothing about EITC,” she said. “But last year, I got a refund of $4,500.”

The EITC was approved by Congress, and signed into law by President Ford in 1975, in part to give an incentive to low-wage workers to remain in the workforce. But each year millions of EITC dollars go unclaimed because eligible workers don’t know about the program.

On June 25, Senator Schumer and Rep. Rahm Emanuel introduced legislation to rectify the problem. Their bill, the Earned Income Credit Information Act of 2008, would require that employers notify their workers of their potential eligibility for the EITC.

According to the General Accountability Office, at least one out of four eligible workers doesn’t apply for EITC because they don’t know about it. In 2005, 22.8 million tax filers received $47.4 billion in tax credits through the program — making it the largest single federal anti-poverty program. But millions more did not.

While Messrs. Schumer and Emanuel are Democrats, EITC is hardly a partisan program. Years after President Ford signed it into law, Ronald Reagan called EITC “the best anti-poverty, best pro-family … measure to come out of Congress.” A California state version of the Schumer-Emanuel bill already has been enacted by Governor Schwarzenegger.

Since 1199 SEIU began EITC counseling for our members in New York City in 2003, thousands in New York, Massachusetts, and Maryland have participated and secured tens of millions of dollars in back taxes which are theirs but which they would otherwise not know about.

The 1199 SEIU members who are served are largely home health aides, home care attendants, and personal care attendants. They are wonderful, dedicated workers, caring for people in need in their homes. But sadly most of them make between $8 and $12 an hour.

1199 SEIU United Healthcare Workers East also has made counseling available to the working poor outside of our membership. In 2005, for example, we served 36,982 non-1199 members in New York City alone, securing for them a total of $70 million returned income.

For the working poor, this program has proven very beneficial in putting money back in their pockets. It is possible for a low-income worker to get back $5,000 for a single year, and some have gotten up to three years of retroactive taxes.

EITC is not charity. It is the law, and it is aimed at returning what rightfully belongs to working families and individuals. The problem is that they are not aware of it unless we inform them. The Earned Income Credit Information Act of 2008 would mandate that eligible workers be informed.

Mr. Gresham is the president of 1199 SEIU United Healthcare Workers East.