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IRS

Singer Lauryn Hill starts prison sentence for $1M tax evasion

Lauryn Hill began serving a three-month jail sentence Monday after pleading guilty last year to not paying approximately $1 million in taxes.

Lauryn Hill began serving a three-month jail sentence Monday after pleading guilty last year to not paying approximately $1 million in taxes.

The singer and rapper, best known as a member of the Fugees, reported to the federal prison in Danbury, Conn., according to the Associated Press, which quoted a Bureau of Prisons spokesman. Following the completion of her stint there, she’s to spend an additional three months under home confinement, the AP said.

Hill was sentenced in May, the result of leaving taxes on earnings of over $2 million unpaid from 2005 to 2009. At the time the singer’s attorney said she’d paid back the debt; Hill herself compared the music business to a form of slavery and said she’d “had an economic system imposed on me,” according to the AP.

More recently, Hill addressed the jail sentence in a post on her Tumblr page, writing, “I shuddered during sentencing when I kept hearing the term ‘make the IRS whole’ … make the IRS whole, knowing that I got into these very circumstances having to deal with the very energies of inequity and resistance that created and perpetuated these savage inequalites. The entire time, I thought, who has made black people whole?!”

Hill’s last album, “MTV Unplugged No. 2.0,” came out in 2002. In May she released a single, “Neurotic Society (Compulsory Mix),” the initial offering from a new deal with Sony Music.

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Copyright 2013 – Los Angeles Times