Thursday, November 4, 2010

Does crime really pay?

The MDJ article on page 5B of the 6-24-2010 issue reports that 1,300 inmates in prison filed for a total of $9 million under the $8,000 first-time homebuyer tax credit.

It was reported that 14,100 tax filers wrongly received about $27 million in tax credits. Apparently, this number doesn't include the people who filed and received the tax credit in 2009 that never bought homes. (I wonder how much of that we'll recover?)

• One home was used more than 65 times to get the same credit.

• Some even got the credit for sales "prior to" the start of the effective date.

Total claims filed amounted to almost $19 Billion.

The National Association of Realtors (NAR) reported that about 1 million new homes were sold that probably wouldn't have if the tax credit wasn't available. (Don't really know how they got those figures. I would imagine that most would be sold anyway, just later in the year and not before the 4-30-2010 contract cutoff date.)

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