Prison Inmates claiming millions in tax refund Over the past few years prisoner tax refund fraud has sky rocketed. According to the article - (Prisoners rake in millions from tax fraud, 2013) “In 2010, more than 91,000 inmate returns claimed $759 million in fraudulent refunds.” 1 That figure was more than double from the previous year. How is it a convicted felon who is behind bars still gets to cheat the system by robbing innocent tax payers of billions in tax refunds on an annual basis? This type of white collar crime is easily committed, all that is needed is the use of a computer with internet access and a great deal of time which a prisoner is in no shortage of having. They can educate themselves on how to hack into hundreds of databases that contains people’s personal information including social security numbers. Once that information is gathered they can begin the process of stealing tax refunds they are certainly not due by filing fraudulent income tax forms, sometimes hundreds at a time by using legitimate names and social security numbers, sometimes the names of their inmates, relatives or even people who are deceased. It is the duty of the IRS to fix this problem. This paper will highlight a few cases of inmate tax refund fraud and what measures the IRS has taken and will continue to take in order to protect innocent victims against this type of fraud. Case summaries involving inmate tax refund fraud The following cases are classic examples of how easily criminals in the U.S. Justice System are finding easy ways to commit tax refund fraud, in fact one article states that “Tax fraud appears to be a popular pastime in the nation’s prisons”2 (2 Prison Inmates Claim $1.1 Billion in Tax Refunds, 2013). If two inmates alone can claim approximately $1.1 billion in tax refund, one can certainly assert that this is way more than a lucrative