Hundreds of thousands of dollars in coronavirus relief payments have been sent to people behind bars across the U.S., and the IRS wants the money back.
The Associated Pressrelief payments have been sent to people behind bars across the United States, and now the IRS is asking state officials to help claw back the cash that the federal tax agency says was mistakenly sent.
Tax attorney Kelly Erb, who's written about the issue on her website, says there's no legal basis for asking for the checks back. The IRS doesn’t yet have numbers on how many payments went to prisoners, Smith said. But initial data from some states suggest the numbers are huge: The Kansas Department of Correction alone intercepted more than $200,000 in checks by early June. Idaho and Montana combined had seized over $90,000.
The IRS seems to have decided by itself to pull back the payments approved by Congress, said Wanda Bertram, a spokeswoman for the Prison Policy Initiative, a think tank focusing on the harm of mass incarceration. She says prison officials are accustomed to intercepting tax documents to screen for potential scams, priming them to follow this request.
Intercepting relief checks may also have a disproportionate impact on Black and Hispanic inmates, who are incarcerated at a higher rate than white Americans. Black people are imprisoned at roughly twice the rate of Hispanic residents, and more than five times the rate of whites as of last year, according to the U.S. Department of Justice's Bureau of Justice Statistics.
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