Unbelievable!
Thanks to Myrl for this information.
Real Estate Professionals often lament about mortgage lenders that provided liar loans and mortgages to otherwise unqualified homebuyers, and helped kick-start the housing crisis we presently find ourselves in. But how about adding salt to the wound by finding out the IRS actually sent $9 million in First Time Homebuyer Tax Credits to 1300 convicted prisoners across the country!
Ya gotta love Mike Leury of Sacramento TV station KOVR Channel 13. And that's even if you don't live in Sacramento, and are located most anywhere around the country. Mike has a special knack for uncovering outrageous boondoggles - such as this one, which he covers in a news segment titled, "On The Money."
This evening, Leury reported on the government disclosure - an audit by the federal government, which found the 1300 inmates nationwide, collected the millions, which were supposed to help stimulate the economy. Some prisoners were serving life sentences.
Along with the two million folks who bought homes due to the popular First Time Homebuyer program, hundreds of convicted criminals also managed to collect the $8,000 tax credits while sitting in prison.
If folks are scratching their heads and wondering how prisoners were able to receive refunds for homebuyer credits on their tax returns, the federal audit discloses, "It's because Internal Revenue Service prisoner files are incomplete."
The IRS is trying to recapture the $9 million in wrongly collected funds.
For the complete story as presented by Mike Leury, you can access his "On The Money: Inmate Homebuyers?" report.
In another blog, "We Should Be Mad as Hell and We Shouldn't Take it Anymore," which I titled a few days ago, I addressed another of Leury's reports which exposed California State Lands Commission failure to collect rent on 500 acres of land for twelve years from USS-Posco, as well as rents for six years from an oil company on a pipeline crossing state lands - Boondoggles that cost the state California millions in lost revenue.
The Scott Loper Team
Scott Loper - Associate Broker
Lisa Loper - Sales Associate
RE/MAX Realty Group
439 Main Street
Harleysville, PA 19438
Ph: 215-256-1200 x-213
Thank you so much for the reblog, I really appreciate it! I think it is important that we attempt to keep these travesties in the public eye. Hopefully, one day, there will be fewer of them!
Hi Myrl,
Agreed! Anytime government takes taxpayer money, we can almost count on a good portion of it getting misused or wasted.
~Lisa