Have you ever watched a dollar amount sit on a screen — approved, accepted, supposedly on its way — while the bills it was meant to cover quietly multiplied? That question was still on my mind when I first read a comment Rochelle Fulton left beneath one of my earlier articles on IRS processing delays.
Her comment wasn’t long. It didn’t ask for sympathy. She wrote, plainly: “Filed January 19th. Still processing March 14th. I have $340 in insulin costs I’ve been putting off. Is this normal?” I reached out the same afternoon. Two days later, we were on a video call — her in a Detroit kitchen she shares with her fiancé, Marcus, me at my desk with a legal pad full of questions I suspected she’d already answered herself a dozen times over.
A Return Filed Early, A Refund That Didn’t Follow
Rochelle Fulton is 39, an HVAC technician with a regional service company in the Detroit metro area. She’s been in the trade for fourteen years. In 2025, she earned just over $84,000 — solid income, the kind that should make financial stress feel manageable. But income and stability aren’t the same thing, and Rochelle knows that better than most.
She filed her 2025 federal return on January 19, 2026, using tax preparation software she’s trusted for years. The IRS accepted the return the same day. The IRS Where’s My Refund tool showed a projected deposit date of February 6th — seventeen days out. She had already mapped out exactly where the $3,847 would go.
About $1,200 was earmarked for a MedCredit balance — the remnant of an ER visit the previous spring when Rochelle’s insurance didn’t cover an imaging procedure her doctor ordered. Another $900 was going toward her auto loan, where she was roughly $2,400 underwater on a 2022 truck she’d financed at a dealership that no longer exists. The rest, she told me, was going into a buffer account so she could afford the new prescription copays after her employer switched insurance carriers in December.
February 6th came and went.
When “Processing” Becomes Its Own Kind of Debt
The IRS tool updated once, around February 11th, to say her return was still being processed and no further action was needed. That message, Rochelle said, was both reassuring and maddening.
She called the IRS Refund Hotline — 1-800-829-1954 — on February 18th, nearly a month after filing. The automated system repeated what the online tool said. She waited to speak with an agent and was told, after roughly 45 minutes on hold, that her return had been flagged for additional review under a process the agent could not detail further. No timeline was given. No letter had been sent.
According to the Taxpayer Advocate Service, millions of returns are pulled for manual review each filing season, often triggered by mismatches in reported income, credits, or identity verification flags. Most resolve without the taxpayer needing to do anything. But “most” and “yours” don’t always overlap, and the waiting is the same either way.
The Real Cost of Waiting: Prescriptions, Interest, and Exhaustion
Rochelle’s new insurance plan, effective December 1, 2025, came with higher copays on two medications she takes for a thyroid condition diagnosed four years ago. Under her old plan, she paid $28 a month combined. Under the new one: $112. The refund was supposed to cover roughly three months of that gap while she adjusted her budget.
Instead, she started stretching her doses. She told me this without drama, the way someone describes a workaround they’ve normalized. “I’m not proud of it,” she said. “But $112 in a month where I’ve already deferred one credit card payment — something has to give.”
Her credit card balance — about $4,600, accumulated mostly during the ER incident and subsequent follow-up visits — was sitting at 24.99% APR. Each month she deferred a payment, the interest added roughly $95. Over the 67 days she waited for her refund, she estimates the compounding cost her somewhere between $190 and $210 in additional interest she wouldn’t have accrued had she been able to pay down the balance in February as planned.
Marcus, her fiancé, is finishing a graduate program in mechanical engineering. He works part-time but his income is modest and unpredictable. Rochelle is, by her own accounting, the financial anchor of their household. That responsibility doesn’t break her — she’s too practical for that — but it grinds.
The Deposit Arrived — But Not Exactly as Planned
On March 27th, sixty-seven days after she filed, Rochelle’s bank account received $3,847. No letter accompanied it. No IRS notice arrived to explain what had triggered the review or what resolved it. The Where’s My Refund tool had updated to “Refund Sent” the morning of the deposit.
I asked her what she did first. She laughed — genuinely, for the first time in our conversation. “I paid for my prescriptions. That was the first thing. I went to the pharmacy that same day.”
The MedCredit balance got $1,100. The credit card received $800 — less than she’d planned, because two months of carrying the balance had eaten into what she had available to allocate. The auto loan got a regular payment plus $300 extra toward principal. The remainder went into savings, which she admitted felt like “plugging a leak with a finger.”
One detail stood out to me after we finished talking. Rochelle had never contacted the Taxpayer Advocate Service, which exists specifically to help people experiencing financial hardship due to IRS delays. She didn’t know she could. Per the Taxpayer Advocate Service, taxpayers can request assistance if a delay is causing significant financial difficulty — it’s a free federal service that can sometimes accelerate resolution.
What Rochelle Wishes She Had Known Earlier
When I asked Rochelle what she’d tell someone in her position at the start of that 67-day wait, she didn’t offer a list of tips. She’s not that kind of person. She thought about it for a moment and said something that stuck with me.
She’s not bitter about the IRS specifically. She understands, in the abstract, that tens of millions of returns are processed each year and that the agency is chronically understaffed. What she struggles with is the opacity — the fact that a return can be flagged, held for over two months, and then released without a single piece of communication explaining what happened.
According to the IRS operations page, e-filed returns with direct deposit are typically processed within 21 days. When manual review is triggered — by income discrepancies, identity verification requirements, or credit eligibility questions — that timeline can extend significantly, sometimes requiring the taxpayer to respond to a formal notice before processing continues. Rochelle never received such a notice. Her return resolved on its own.
When we ended our call, Rochelle was getting ready for an afternoon service call — a commercial unit in a warehouse district that had been down since the night before. She had a full day ahead. The refund was spent. The next round of bills was already arriving. She was, in her words, “back to the regular version of the same problem.”
That phrase has stayed with me. The money arrived. It did what it was supposed to do, more or less. But the two months of waiting didn’t disappear — they left a residue: extra interest charged, doses skipped, energy spent on anxiety that Rochelle, who works with her hands in extreme temperatures and comes home tired, didn’t have to spare. The refund resolved. The cost of waiting for it did not.
Related: One Year From Medicare, His Health Insurance Hit $674 a Month — and the Property Taxes Went Unpaid
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