Roughly one in five tax refunds flagged for identity or income verification sits in IRS review for more than 45 days, according to data published by the IRS Filing Season Statistics unit — a number that sounds abstract until it belongs to your rent check. When I sat down with Carlos Mendez at a corner table inside the Miami restaurant he now manages, that statistic had a face, a family of six, and a February filing date that stretched into April before anything resolved.
Carlos is 55, broad-shouldered, and speaks with the careful precision of someone who has learned that details matter. He manages a mid-size Cuban restaurant on Southwest Eighth Street, a job he found after COVID shuttered his previous employer for good. The new position pays roughly $18,000 less per year than the one he lost. Between his two biological children, his wife Elena’s two kids from her previous marriage, and the sporadic child support payments that arrive — or don’t — from Elena’s ex-husband, every tax season carries real weight.
A Return Filed on February 3, 2026 — And Then Silence
Carlos told me he paid a tax preparer $185 to file his 2025 federal return on February 3, 2026. He and Elena together claimed four dependents: his two biological children, ages 14 and 17, and Elena’s two kids, ages 9 and 12, for whom Carlos provides primary financial support. The expected refund, he said, was $4,127 — a combination of the Child Tax Credit, a partial Earned Income Tax Credit, and standard withholding adjustments.
He checked the IRS Where’s My Refund? tool for the first time on February 12. The status read “Return Received.” He checked again on February 19 and saw the same message. By February 26 — five days past the agency’s own 21-day benchmark — the status still had not advanced to “Refund Approved.”
On March 1, a CP05 notice arrived in his mailbox. The letter — a standard IRS review notice — informed him that his return had been selected for additional review of income, withholding, and tax credits, and that the agency needed up to 60 days from the date of the notice to complete that review. No action was required from Carlos at that stage, the letter said. He was simply supposed to wait.
Why the IRS Flags Blended Family Returns
The short answer: dependent credit claims are among the most commonly contested items on individual returns. The IRS Child Tax Credit allows up to $2,000 per qualifying child under 17. The Earned Income Tax Credit — which phases in and out based on income and family size — can add between $632 and $7,830 for tax year 2025, depending on the number of children claimed.
In blended families, the same child’s Social Security number can appear on two different returns in the same year — filed by a biological parent, a stepparent, or a custodial versus non-custodial parent. When that happens, the IRS computer system flags both returns for review. Carlos and Elena had documentation: a custody agreement, school enrollment records, and proof that Elena’s ex-husband — who pays child support inconsistently and had not filed as of early March — was not the primary caregiver. But gathering and presenting that documentation takes time Carlos did not have.
As Carlos explained, the timing compounded everything. Elena’s ex had missed two consecutive months of child support payments by late February — a gap of roughly $880 that the family had absorbed by cutting grocery trips. The utility bill, the school activity fee for the 9-year-old, the prescription refill for Carlos’s older son: each of those small amounts had been mentally assigned to the tax refund. When the refund stalled, the dominos started to tip.
The Weeks That Wore Him Down
I asked Carlos what the hardest part was. He didn’t answer immediately. He watched a server reset a nearby table, then looked back at me.
He called the IRS Taxpayer Assistance line on March 14, approximately two weeks after receiving the CP05 notice. After a 47-minute hold, he reached an agent who confirmed the return was under review and that no additional documentation had been requested. The agent told him the review would complete by April 30 at the latest — cold comfort when the FPL disconnect notice arrived on March 19 for a balance of $214.
Carlos borrowed $300 from a coworker on March 21. He is not a man who does that easily. “I’ve been working since I was 16,” he told me. “I never wanted to be the guy who asks.” He paid his coworker back the following week from his regular paycheck, which left him short on groceries for the last four days of March.
The Deposit Arrived — and the Relief Was Complicated
Carlos woke up on April 1, 2026, to a bank notification. The $4,127 had landed in his checking account overnight. He told me he sat on the edge of the bed for a few minutes before saying anything to Elena.
The allocation, as he described it to me, went like this: $214 to clear the FPL balance, $380 toward a past-due credit card minimum, roughly $600 in groceries for the month, $200 set aside for the older kids’ school expenses in April, and the remainder folded into the household’s operating account. There was no savings deposit. There was no emergency fund contribution. The 58-day wait had not changed the math — it had only delayed it.
The IRS review had ultimately found nothing wrong. The CP05 process closed without a request for additional documentation, which Carlos’s tax preparer said suggested the system had likely flagged the return automatically based on the number of dependents and the size of the credit claims relative to reported income — a pattern the IRS Taxpayer Advocate Service has documented as disproportionately affecting lower-income filers with complex family structures.
What Carlos Wishes He Had Known
Before I left the restaurant, I asked Carlos if he would do anything differently when he files next year. He leaned back and crossed his arms — not defensively, just thinking.
He also said he plans to ask his preparer to keep cleaner documentation of the dependent custody arrangements before filing — not because he did anything wrong, but because having that paperwork organized ahead of time might speed up any future review. His preparer had told him that taxpayers who receive a CP05A notice and respond with complete documentation typically see their refunds released within two to three weeks of the IRS receiving the documents.
The broader reality Carlos is navigating — a blended household on a single manager’s salary, unreliable child support, no savings cushion after COVID — is not unique to him. According to U.S. Census Bureau data, approximately 16 percent of children in the United States live in blended family households, and households where one partner has children from a prior relationship report lower median savings rates than two-biological-parent households at every income level.
Tax refunds fill gaps that the regular paycheck cannot. When those refunds are delayed — even for routine administrative reasons — the consequences are not administrative. They are a borrowed $300, four days of thin groceries, and a man sitting quietly on the edge of a bed at six in the morning doing arithmetic he already knows the answer to.
Carlos walked me to the door when I left. He shook my hand and went back inside to open the kitchen. His shift had already started.
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