The first thing I noticed about Duane Reeves was that he was holding a printout. It was folded into thirds, worn at the creases, and he kept unfolding and refolding it while he waited at the pharmacy counter in South Tampa. When the pharmacist mentioned a prescription assistance form, Duane asked — very quietly, like he didn’t want anyone nearby to hear — whether there was a sliding-scale option. I was picking up my own prescription two spots behind him in line. That’s how we met.
We ended up talking in the parking lot for forty minutes. By the time I asked if he’d be willing to sit down for a longer conversation about his finances and his recent experience with the IRS, he paused, looked at his phone, and said, “Sure. As long as you don’t make me sound like I don’t know what I’m doing.” He laughed when he said it. I didn’t think he was entirely joking.
A Refund Built Into the Budget Before It Arrived
Duane Reeves is 63, a licensed clinical social worker employed by a nonprofit behavioral health agency in Hillsborough County. He earns roughly $51,000 a year before taxes — a salary he described, without bitterness, as “what the job pays.” He is raising his 12-year-old daughter largely on his own. Her mother, he told me, has not contributed financially in over two years.
His monthly obligations are significant. After-school care and summer program fees run approximately $680 per month. His income-driven student loan repayment — leftover from the master’s degree in social work he completed at 47 — comes to $340 a month. Between rent, utilities, groceries, and a 2017 Honda Civic with 114,000 miles on it, Duane told me he operates with almost no cushion.
So when Duane sat down to file his 2024 federal return on February 3, 2025, the $2,840 refund he calculated wasn’t abstract. It was already mentally spent. “That money was going toward three months of after-school care and one loan payment,” he told me when we met at a coffee shop near his office the following week. “I had it mapped out. I just needed the IRS to do its part.”
The 21-Day Promise That Didn’t Hold
According to the IRS refunds portal, most electronically filed returns with direct deposit are processed within 21 days. Duane filed electronically through a commercial tax software on February 3. He checked “Where’s My Refund?” on February 10 and saw the status had moved to “Return Received.” He took that as a good sign.
Then it stalled. For weeks, the status sat at “Return Received” without moving to “Refund Approved.” Duane told me he checked the portal every morning before his daughter woke up. He called the IRS helpline twice in late February. Both times, he waited over 40 minutes and was told — by automated message — that his return was still processing and no further information was available.
Duane’s return included the Child Tax Credit. He wasn’t sure, when we spoke, whether that triggered the PATH Act delay or whether something else caused the hold. What he knew was that February turned into March and the portal never updated.
The Gap Between the Portal and Real Life
While the IRS portal sat frozen, Duane’s bills kept moving. His after-school childcare provider — a licensed facility he’d been using for three years — sent a past-due notice on March 4 for $1,360, covering February and March. Duane told me he called and asked for two more weeks. “They were understanding,” he said. “They know me. But I could hear in her voice that she’d heard it before from other parents.”
To cover the gap, Duane put $700 on a credit card he had kept at a zero balance since 2022. He borrowed $400 from his mother, who is 84 and lives in a retirement community in St. Petersburg. He described that phone call as “the one I didn’t want to make.”
What struck me, sitting across from Duane at that coffee shop, was how carefully he had managed the optics of this situation. His colleagues didn’t know. His daughter didn’t know the money was late. He had, in his words, “kept it together on the outside.” That composure — the instinct to project stability even under real pressure — felt like both a survival skill and a burden.
The Deposit That Finally Came — and What Was Missing
On April 5, 2025 — 61 days after Duane filed — his bank account received a direct deposit from the U.S. Treasury. The amount was $2,614. Not the $2,840 he had calculated.
The IRS had sent a CP12 notice dated April 1, which Duane received by mail on April 8 — three days after the adjusted deposit already landed. The notice explained that the IRS had corrected a math error in his return related to a Recovery Rebate Credit claim, reducing his refund by $226. Duane told me he stared at the notice for a long time. “I didn’t even know I had claimed that credit,” he said. “The software must have added it. I just went through the questions.”
According to the IRS’s CP12 notice guidance, taxpayers generally have 60 days to dispute a math-error correction before it becomes final. Duane told me he reviewed the numbers, concluded the IRS was probably right, and decided not to contest it. “Two hundred dollars matters,” he said. “But I wasn’t going to start another fight with them.”
What He Would Do Differently
When I asked Duane what, if anything, he’d change about how he approached this year’s filing season, he gave a long answer that I’ll compress here. He said he wished he hadn’t mentally spent the refund before it cleared. He said he would not claim credits he didn’t fully understand, even if the software prompts him. And he said he would file even earlier next year — possibly in late January — to give himself more runway before the bills came due.
He also mentioned, almost as an aside, that he had looked into the Taxpayer Advocate Service in early March when the delay stretched past five weeks. The TAS — an independent organization within the IRS — assists taxpayers facing significant hardship caused by IRS actions or inaction. Duane said he filled out the Form 911 request online but never submitted it. “By the time I got it filled out, I thought maybe it would just show up,” he told me. “And eventually it did. But I wish I’d sent it.”
The Part He Hadn’t Said Out Loud Before
Near the end of our second conversation — a phone call in late March, after the money had finally arrived — I asked Duane how he was doing overall. There was a pause long enough that I thought the call had dropped.
“I’m fine,” he said. “I’m always fine. That’s the thing.” He laughed a little. “I just get tired of being fine while everything’s this tight.”
He paid off his credit card the same week the deposit cleared. He sent his mother a check for $400 and included a gift card to her favorite restaurant. His daughter’s after-school balance was zeroed out by April 10. By every external measure, the episode was over and resolved. But Duane told me he was already thinking about next year’s return — already calculating what he might owe versus what he might be owed, already wondering whether to adjust his withholding so the refund would be smaller and the wait would matter less.
Whether that adjustment makes sense for his specific situation is a question for a tax professional — not for me, and Duane knows that. But the instinct behind it felt entirely human. He had built a system that relied on the IRS to show up on time. The IRS didn’t. And now he was quietly, methodically, trying to build a system that didn’t depend on that.
When I left the parking lot that first afternoon, Duane was still standing next to his Honda. He had the prescription in one hand and his phone in the other, checking something — I assumed “Where’s My Refund?” — one more time before driving home to make dinner for his daughter.
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