Woman Gets $20,000 Tax Bill After Winning COVID Vaccine Lottery

A West Virginia woman said she was hit with a $20,000 tax bill for a truck she won as part of the state's COVID-19 vaccine lottery program.

Grace Fowler said in an interview with CBS News that "it blew her mind" when she received the bill for the brand-new, custom-outfitted truck that Governor Jim Justice presented to her in July 2021.

"Well how am I going to pay these taxes, you know? I'd have to pay for years and years and years," she said, adding that "The next time someone says 'you win,' I'mma say 'keep it.'"

Fowler is among hundreds of West Virginians who entered into Justice's "Do It for Babydog" vaccination sweepstakes, which was named after the governor's English bulldog and which offered a series of statewide prize drawings to incentivize residents to get their COVID-19 vaccines.

"If you won't do it for me, if you won't do it for your family, you've got to get vaccinated for Babydog," Justice said. "She wants you vaccinated so badly."

West Virginia offered more than $20 million in prizes, ranging from educational savings funds to vacations to trucks, as part of its vaccine lottery, outspending its neighboring states on its lucky draw. Comparably, Ohio's lottery offered $13 million in prizes and Maryland's lottery offered $4 million.

The trucks that Justice's administration presented winning residents are now the subject of a federal inquiry, according to CBS.

Newsweek reached out to Justice via email for comment.

The Do It For Babydog registration website did warn prize winners that they could be "responsible for applicable Federal, State, and Local taxes." But many residents didn't expect their prizes to rack up such exorbitant fees.

The car dealer that provided the trucks for Justice's sweepstakes submitted documents to CBS showing the vehicles came loaded with extras that drove up the tax bills for lottery winners.

Unable to pay the bills on her truck, Fowler decided to sell her vehicle the next year. The dealer said Fowler was not the only one to sell her prize.

West Virginia's vaccine lottery program is also facing criticisms over its effectiveness. A 2021 study from the Jama Health Forum found that vaccine lotteries, which were rolled out by a number of states, failed to convince residents into getting their shots.

"This looked like a really exciting policy that we were really rooting for when we saw lotteries come out and it's frankly disappointing we weren't able to find any evidence they were capable of moving the needle in this respect," co-author of the study, Andrew Friedson told CBS.

GOP State Senator Eric Tarr, who has asked for an inquiry into Justice's handling of COVID relief funds, said the governor's plan was "way too ambitious for something that really had no reason to know that it was going to move the needle."