04-15-2010, 09:26 AM
0
geeze...and i worry whether i might have made an error on tax returns! 
Key West, Florida (CNN) -- Officer Mark Lindback started his day off with a routine contraband check of a jail cell. He pulled up the inmate's mattress, and ducked his head under the bed. He didn't find any shanks or drugs, but he did find papers -- lots and lots of papers.
The inmate immediately became irate.
"He was very insistent on getting back his paperwork," Lindback said. "It made me look more thoroughly to see what it was."
Lindback says he found tax forms, papers with instructions on how to fill out the forms along with various social security numbers and birth dates during that routine check four years ago.
He turned the papers over to his supervisor, not knowing at the time that he had stumbled upon a tax scam in which prison inmates allegedly were attempting to bilk the government out of more than $1 million.
Investigators say Monroe County jail inmates in Key West had been filing false tax return forms for jobs they never had as far back as 2004, and getting thousands of dollars a pop in refund checks.
Using a formula that kept their refunds to amounts under $5,000 per claim, inmates thought they would fly under the radar, investigators say. And they did for years, passing around cheat sheets that showed line by line how to fill out the complicated forms.
The scam however is not a local gig. Investigators and federal officials say it has been going on for decades in state and federal prisons around the country.
"These guys weren't rocket scientists...They didn't just wake up and come up with this great scheme," Monroe County Sheriff Bob Peryam said.
Here's how it allegedly worked: using names of defunct or made up businesses as places of work and a master cheat sheet for salary and other numerical information, inmates filled out 4852 tax forms -- the ones you use if your employer didn't provide you with a W-2.
The inmates sent the forms in and the IRS then issued refund checks, in some cases sending them directly to the county jail. But inmates didn't just fill out the forms for themselves. For a $500 fee ringleaders at the prison filled out refund requests for other inmates, promising they would each get a return of about $4,500.
Key West, Florida (CNN) -- Officer Mark Lindback started his day off with a routine contraband check of a jail cell. He pulled up the inmate's mattress, and ducked his head under the bed. He didn't find any shanks or drugs, but he did find papers -- lots and lots of papers.
The inmate immediately became irate.
"He was very insistent on getting back his paperwork," Lindback said. "It made me look more thoroughly to see what it was."
Lindback says he found tax forms, papers with instructions on how to fill out the forms along with various social security numbers and birth dates during that routine check four years ago.
He turned the papers over to his supervisor, not knowing at the time that he had stumbled upon a tax scam in which prison inmates allegedly were attempting to bilk the government out of more than $1 million.
Investigators say Monroe County jail inmates in Key West had been filing false tax return forms for jobs they never had as far back as 2004, and getting thousands of dollars a pop in refund checks.
Using a formula that kept their refunds to amounts under $5,000 per claim, inmates thought they would fly under the radar, investigators say. And they did for years, passing around cheat sheets that showed line by line how to fill out the complicated forms.
The scam however is not a local gig. Investigators and federal officials say it has been going on for decades in state and federal prisons around the country.
"These guys weren't rocket scientists...They didn't just wake up and come up with this great scheme," Monroe County Sheriff Bob Peryam said.
Here's how it allegedly worked: using names of defunct or made up businesses as places of work and a master cheat sheet for salary and other numerical information, inmates filled out 4852 tax forms -- the ones you use if your employer didn't provide you with a W-2.
The inmates sent the forms in and the IRS then issued refund checks, in some cases sending them directly to the county jail. But inmates didn't just fill out the forms for themselves. For a $500 fee ringleaders at the prison filled out refund requests for other inmates, promising they would each get a return of about $4,500.
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