Singer and songwriter Lauryn Hill began serving her three-month sentence for tax evasion at a minimum-security federal correctional institution in Danbury, Conn.
The former lead singer of the Fugees who won a Grammy for her album “The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill” was sentenced in May to three months in prison and three months of home confinement for failing to file tax returns for five years and not reporting more than $2.3 million in income (see
In addition to being a singer and actress, Hill owned and operated four S corporations, and her primary source of income was royalties from the recording and film industries. She won Grammy Awards for her 1998 solo album “The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill” and had recorded several successful albums with her previous group, The Fugees.
During 2005, 2006 and 2007, Hill received more than $1.8 million in income from those sources, according to prosecutors, but didn’t file her tax returns for those years. While Hill pleaded guilty to charges specifically related to those tax years, her sentence also takes into account additional income and tax losses for 2008 and 2009— when she also failed to file federal returns—along with her outstanding tax liability to the state of New Jersey, for a total income of approximately $2.3 million and total tax loss of approximately $1,006,517.
During the hearing, Hill compared her tax predicament to slavery. “I was put into a system I didn’t know the nature of,” she said, according to the
When Hill was originally charged by federal authorities, she wrote a lengthy explanation on her