The last Tuesday in February, Wanda Womack pulled her rig into a truck stop off I-65 outside Louisville and checked her IRS2Go app for the fourth time that day. The refund status had been sitting on “Refund Approved” for eleven days. She was expecting $2,847 — money she had been counting on since October, when her landlord handed her a lease renewal with a rent increase from $970 to $1,261 a month. Instead of a deposit notification, she got a letter from the Bureau of the Fiscal Service explaining that her entire refund had been seized.
I first connected with Wanda through a veterans’ support group in Louisville’s West End neighborhood. A coordinator there had flagged her story after Wanda shared what happened at a February meeting — her voice steady but her hands gripping a folded letter from the Treasury Department. The group passed along her contact, and when I called, she picked up on the second ring. “I’ve been waiting for someone to ask,” she said.
A Refund She Had Already Spent in Her Head
Wanda has driven long-haul routes for a regional freight company since 2017. In 2025, she brought home roughly $39,400 — solid work, but tight by any measure when you factor in her husband Marcus’s reduced hours and the full-time care their eleven-year-old son, Devonte, requires. Devonte has a rare neurological condition that means one of his parents is always home. Marcus works part-time stocking shelves on a night shift; Wanda drives what routes she can around school pickup and therapy appointments.
When I sat down with Wanda at a diner near her home in late March, she spread three pieces of paper on the table: her 1040, her IRS transcript, and the offset notice. “I filed January 28th,” she told me. “I had a CPA at a community tax clinic do it free of charge. She said with the Child Tax Credit and the Earned Income Credit, I was looking at right around $2,800 back.”
The $2,847 refund was not a windfall in Wanda’s mind — it was a calculated bridge. Her rent was jumping $291 a month starting March 1st. She had mapped it out: the refund would cover three months of the difference while she picked up additional dispatch runs and sold handmade candles on a local Facebook marketplace group she had been running since 2023. “I had a whole plan,” she said, not bitterly, just matter-of-fact.
The Letter Nobody Warned Her Was Coming
The Bureau of the Fiscal Service offset notice arrived on February 24th, dated four days earlier. It stated that $2,847 had been applied toward an outstanding balance with a federal student loan servicer — a loan Wanda says she entered into an income-driven repayment plan for in 2021 and believed was in good standing.
Under the Treasury Offset Program, the Bureau of the Fiscal Service is required to send a pre-offset notice to the debtor’s last known address before intercepting a refund. Wanda believes that notice may have gone to an address in Clarksville, Indiana, where she and Marcus lived before moving to Louisville in mid-2023. She never updated her address with the loan servicer after the move.
Trying to Fight Back — and What She Found Out
The week after she received the notice, Wanda called the TOP call center number listed on the letter. She was on hold for 47 minutes before reaching an agent who confirmed the seizure but told her disputes had to be filed with the originating agency — the loan servicer — not with the Bureau of the Fiscal Service directly.
She filed a dispute with the loan servicer on March 3rd, arguing that her account had been in an active repayment arrangement and that she had not been properly notified at her current address. As of the day we spoke, the dispute was still open, sitting somewhere in an administrative queue with no estimated resolution date. “They gave me a case number,” she told me. “That’s it. A case number.”
Wanda also learned through the veterans’ group that she might have qualified for an injured spouse allocation — IRS Form 8379 — if the debt had belonged solely to her husband rather than to her directly. Because the student loan was in her name, that particular relief did not apply. It was one more door that opened and led nowhere.
How She Covered March — and What It Cost Her
Without the refund, Wanda needed $873 in additional income before March 1st. She picked up two extra dispatch runs — one to Memphis, one to Cincinnati — that kept her away from home for a combined 61 hours over a single week. Marcus covered Devonte’s care and therapy pickups alone. “He handled it,” she said. “But that’s not something we can do every month. Devonte needs consistency.”
She also sold 34 candle sets from her Facebook shop in February and March — a hustle she started to fund Devonte’s therapy copays. That brought in roughly $510. Combined with the extra runs, she covered the gap. But she missed a $215 minimum payment on a credit card the same week, which she now says will cost her more in interest over the next few months than she saved anywhere else.
What Wanda Knows Now — and What She Wishes She Had Known in January
When I asked Wanda what she would tell someone in a similar situation — low income, expecting a refund, carrying an old federal debt — she paused for a long moment before answering. “Check that 800 number before you file,” she said, referring to the TOP hotline. “I didn’t know it existed. I thought if my payment plan was active, I was fine. That’s not how it works.”
The IRS’s own guidance on Topic 203 notes that federal income tax refunds can be reduced or eliminated to pay debts including defaulted student loans, back child support, and state income tax obligations. Taxpayers can call 800-304-3107 before filing to learn whether a debt has been submitted to TOP — a step Wanda did not know to take.
Her dispute with the servicer remains open as of early April 2026. If it is resolved in her favor, the refund amount would be returned — but there is no timeline guarantee, and Wanda says she is not counting on seeing that money before summer. “I’ve stopped putting it in my budget,” she told me quietly. “When it comes, it comes.”
What struck me most, sitting across from Wanda in that diner, was not the anger — she had less of it than I expected. It was the fatigue of someone who had been running the numbers so long and so carefully that having the math disrupted by something outside her control felt almost routine. She is already tracking down the address discrepancy, already building her candle inventory for spring, already checking whether an additional Class A endorsement could get her better-paying regional routes. She is not waiting for a resolution. She is driving around it.
Her story does not have a clean ending yet. The $2,847 is still in administrative limbo. The rent is still $291 higher every month. But Wanda Womack is still on the road, still watching the exits on I-65, still doing math no one should have to do alone at 11 p.m. in a truck stop parking lot. That, she told me, is just Tuesday.
Related: This Denver Teacher Almost Skipped Filing Taxes This Year — A Free Clinic Found $4,267 in Credits He’d Never Claimed
Related: My Husband Hid $42,500 in Debt. Then the IRS Seized Our Entire $4,200 Tax Refund.
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