David Rothstein comments on Refund Anticipation Loans in Mother Jones

Mother Jones

JOHN HEWITT WASN’T seeking to turn the working poor into cash cows when his father and some friends helped him buy a six-store tax-service chain in Virginia Beach back in 1982. A 33-year-old college dropout who’d recently left his post as a regional director for H&R Block, Hewitt bought the Mel Jackson Tax Service hoping simply to break his old employer’s near-monopoly on the market. “We’re going to be bigger than H&R Block!” he liked to boast, though his operation was a mere tadpole challenging a leviathan with 7,000 stores in middle-class neighborhoods across the country. Hewitt renamed the company Jackson Hewitt and bet that his early embrace of computers would give him a leg up on his former bosses. But it wasn’t until he began offering something called a refund anticipation loan (RAL)