Have you ever built a financial plan around a number that turned out not to be yours to keep? I had that question in my head when a mutual friend introduced me to Marcus Bianchi at a neighborhood barbecue in Sacramento last month. Marcus was standing near the grill, quiet, nursing a soda water while everyone else swapped vacation stories. Our mutual friend pulled me aside and said, quietly, “He’s been dealing with something with the IRS. He won’t talk to anyone about it. Maybe you could.”
It took three more conversations — two over coffee near his home studio in the Midtown neighborhood — before Marcus opened up. What he shared was not a dramatic story of fraud or criminal penalties. It was something more ordinary and, in many ways, more painful: a working parent who counted on a refund that arrived late, shrunken, and without adequate explanation.
A Freelancer’s Tax Reality in 2026
Marcus Bianchi is 30 years old, married, with three children under the age of eight. His wife stays home with the kids. He supports the family entirely through freelance graphic design work — brand identities, packaging, digital campaigns — billing clients on project terms that rarely align with a predictable calendar.
In a good month, Marcus might bring in $7,500. In a slow one, closer to $2,800. That volatility makes everything harder: grocery budgeting, rent planning, and especially taxes. For the 2025 tax year, Marcus estimated he earned roughly $68,000 in gross freelance income. After deductions for a home office, software subscriptions, and health insurance premiums, his adjusted figure was lower — but he still owed self-employment tax on top of federal income tax.
Marcus filed his 2025 federal return on February 6th using a major tax software platform. His Schedule C was straightforward. He reported income from eleven different 1099-NEC forms. He claimed the Child Tax Credit for all three children and the Earned Income Tax Credit, which he qualified for based on his net self-employment income after deductions. The software calculated a federal refund of $3,400.
“I screenshot it,” Marcus told me. “I know that sounds dumb, but I screenshot the confirmation screen because I needed to see that number. We had a car repair bill that had been sitting on a credit card since November. $1,200. I was going to pay it off the day the refund hit.”
The Wait — And What the IRS Tracker Did Not Explain
Marcus checked the IRS “Where’s My Refund” tool for the first time on February 12th. The tool showed his return had been received. By February 21st, it moved to “processing.” Then it stayed there. For weeks.
The IRS generally processes electronically filed returns within 21 days, according to guidance published on IRS.gov. Paper returns take considerably longer — sometimes 6 to 8 weeks or more. Marcus had filed electronically, so the 21-day window mattered to him. When March 1st arrived with no deposit, he started calling the IRS helpline.
“I called four times in two weeks,” he said. “The wait times were between 45 minutes and two hours. I work from home, so I’d put it on speaker while I was designing. Twice I got disconnected before anyone picked up.”
When Marcus finally reached a live IRS representative on March 14th — thirty-six days after filing — the agent told him his return had been selected for “additional review” related to the Earned Income Tax Credit. The agent could not tell him specifically what triggered the review, only that it was ongoing and that he should expect a letter.
The Offset Nobody Warned Him About
The letter arrived on March 22nd — a CP12 notice. For those unfamiliar with IRS correspondence, the CP12 is a notice the agency sends when it has made changes to a return and the corrected calculation results in a different refund amount. Marcus’s refund had been recalculated downward.
The IRS had identified that Marcus had underreported a $4,200 payment from a client in Q3 of 2025. That client had filed a 1099-NEC for $4,200 that Marcus had accidentally recorded as $2,400 in his own records — a transposition error he made when manually entering data from a paper document. The difference reduced his refund by approximately $312 in additional tax owed.
But the CP12 didn’t account for the full $1,553 gap between Marcus’s expected $3,400 and the $1,847 that eventually deposited on April 18th — eleven weeks after he filed. The remaining difference came from a Treasury Offset Program reduction Marcus had no idea existed.
In 2021, during a particularly rough stretch, Marcus had taken out a federal Perkins Loan for a graphic design certification program and defaulted after making only four of twelve required payments. The outstanding balance, with interest and collection fees, had grown to approximately $1,241. Under the Treasury Offset Program, the federal government is authorized to intercept tax refunds to satisfy defaulted federal student loans. Marcus’s refund had been reduced by $1,241 — and he had not received any direct notice that the offset was coming before it happened.
What the Delay Actually Cost
Numbers on paper are one thing. What Marcus described to me was the specific texture of those eleven weeks: the arguments that almost happened, the credit card balance that kept accruing interest, the mental overhead of not knowing.
“My wife doesn’t know the full picture of our finances,” Marcus said, and I could hear the discomfort in how he phrased it. “I handle all of it. And I had told her the refund was coming in March. When March passed and I kept saying ‘it’s coming,’ she started asking questions I didn’t know how to answer.”
The $1,200 car repair bill sat on a credit card at 24.99% APR for the duration of the wait. Across those eleven weeks, Marcus estimates the interest added roughly $57 to the balance — not catastrophic, but real. More consequential was a $340 freelance job he turned down in late March because the deliverable required a software subscription he had been planning to renew with refund money. He declined the work rather than put the subscription on a card.
When the $1,847 deposit hit on April 18th, Marcus paid off the car repair bill and the accumulated interest. He had $647 left. The offset notice for the Perkins Loan arrived in the mail four days after the deposit — postmarked before the deposit but delivered after, which Marcus found bleakly funny.
What Marcus Knows Now That He Didn’t in February
When I asked Marcus what he wished he had known before filing, the answer came quickly — clearly something he had been turning over for weeks.
He said he didn’t know the Treasury Offset Program existed. He didn’t know you could call the Bureau of the Fiscal Service’s Offset Program call center at 800-304-3107 to find out before filing whether any federal debt would reduce your refund. That number, listed on the IRS refund FAQ page, is specifically designed so taxpayers can check their offset status before they build a budget around a number that may already be spoken for.
He also said he had no system for reconciling incoming 1099s against his own records. He tracked income in a spreadsheet he updated “when he remembered to,” and that habit — or the lapses in it — produced the transposition error that cost him $312 and triggered the extended review.
“I’m not bad at math. I’m not irresponsible,” Marcus told me toward the end of our last conversation. “But when your income is all over the place, you’re just trying to get through the month. The tax stuff feels like something you deal with in February, not something you’re supposed to be tracking in August.”
That sentence stayed with me. It describes something real about how irregular earners experience the tax system — not as an ongoing relationship, but as an annual reckoning that arrives with a bill or a refund and almost never with enough context to understand either.
Marcus’s refund eventually came. His Perkins Loan balance is now $1,241 lower than it was in January, which he acknowledged was not entirely a bad thing. The car repair bill is paid. The software subscription he postponed is active again. But he’s also going into the rest of 2026 with $1,553 less than he had planned for — and a wariness about building a budget around a number he can’t fully control.
He’s not alone in that wariness. For millions of freelancers and gig workers whose income arrives without withholding, tax refund season is less a windfall than a high-stakes reconciliation — one that, as Marcus learned, can be quietly restructured by a government office and a decades-old loan without a single phone call warning you it’s coming.
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