Tax Credits in the Slammer

by Heather Wilhelm When people say they’re going to “the Big House,” they usually mean a football stadium in Ann Arbor, Michigan…or a jail. But prisoners across the country recently gave the latter interpretation of the phrase a whole new meaning, as discovered this week.  “Nearly 1,300 prison inmates wrongly received more than $9 million in...

by Heather Wilhelm

When people say they’re going to “the Big House,” they usually mean a football stadium in Ann Arbor, Michigan…or a jail.

But prisoners across the country recently gave the latter interpretation of the phrase a whole new meaning, as discovered this week.  “Nearly 1,300 prison inmates wrongly received more than $9 million in tax credits for homebuyers despite being locked up when they claimed they bought a home,” the Associated Press reports. “241 of the inmates were serving life sentences.”

The prisoners in the big house weren’t the only ones working for big housing dollars.  They joined more than 14,000 taxpayers who bamboozled the government into sending them over $26 million in inappropriate tax credits, according to the report.