The fellowship hall at Cornerstone Baptist Church in Little Rock smells like industrial coffee and old carpet. On a Tuesday evening in mid-March 2026, Glenn Reeves sat across from me at a folding table, a crumpled IRS notice laid flat between us like evidence at a trial. He had not thrown it away. He had carried it in his jacket pocket for six weeks.
Pastor Darnell Whitfield had introduced us a few days earlier, quietly mentioning that Glenn had been coming to the church’s financial crisis ministry with questions no one there could fully answer. “He needs someone who can actually explain what happened to him,” the pastor told me over the phone. “Because right now he’s just angry, and he doesn’t know who to be angry at.”
A Refund He Had Already Spent in His Head
Glenn Reeves is 37, works the day shift at a manufacturing plant outside Little Rock, and earns roughly $38,000 a year running injection-molding machines. He is single, lives alone in a small house he bought in 2019, and has been quietly covering tuition shortfalls for his younger sister, Deja, who is finishing her junior year at the University of Arkansas at Pine Bluff.
When I spoke with Glenn about his tax situation, he described a refund he had mentally allocated months before he ever filed. His roof had been leaking since October 2025, and two contractors had quoted him between $4,200 and $5,600 to replace the damaged section over the back bedroom. He had been catching rainwater in a plastic storage bin.
Glenn filed his 2025 federal return on February 7, 2026, using a free filing service. His W-2 from the plant showed federal withholding of $2,847 — the number he had been calculating since November. He chose direct deposit and, according to the IRS’s “Where’s My Refund” tool, his return was accepted the same day.
“I checked that app every morning for three weeks,” Glenn told me. “First it said processing. Then approved. Then one day I wake up and there’s $440 in my account. I thought the bank made a mistake. I called the bank. They said talk to the IRS.”
The Cosigned Loan He Almost Forgot He Had Signed
In the spring of 2022, Glenn’s longtime friend Marcus had asked him to cosign a $9,500 federal consolidation loan. Marcus was trying to get his financial life together after some rough years, and Glenn — by his own description — signed without reading every page. “He was my boy,” Glenn said simply, staring at the table. “I didn’t think I needed a lawyer to help out a friend.”
Marcus made payments for about fourteen months. Then, in the fall of 2023, the payments stopped. Glenn says he didn’t know this was happening. He received no calls from the servicer at his current address — he had moved in 2021 — and says the first formal notice he received was a Treasury offset letter in January 2026, which he initially mistook for junk mail and set aside.
The Treasury Offset Program — administered through the Bureau of the Fiscal Service — allows the federal government to intercept tax refunds to cover debts owed to federal agencies, including defaulted student loans. According to the IRS annual report to Congress, offset activity affects hundreds of thousands of refunds each filing season. The borrower — or in Glenn’s case, the cosigner — is supposed to be notified before the offset occurs, but the notice goes to the address on record with the loan servicer, not necessarily a current one.
What the Numbers Look Like This Filing Season — and Why Glenn’s Situation Stands Out
Glenn’s experience lands against a backdrop of unusually high refunds this cycle. According to Yahoo Finance’s tax refund analysis, refunds are up nearly 11% this year, with over 37 million Americans benefiting from new tax provisions. The average refund this season is running around $3,804, and the average direct deposit refund specifically is approximately $3,613, up 8.5% from last year.
For a low-income, single filer like Glenn, the promise of a larger refund season carries real weight. His $2,847 withholding was not an outlier — it fell below the national average, reflecting his income level. What made his situation unusual was not the size of the refund but the invisible liability attached to it.
The gap between what the headlines promise and what some filers actually receive is a story that doesn’t get told often enough. As one analysis noted, bigger refunds are not automatically better news — they can reflect over-withholding throughout the year, meaning the taxpayer was effectively giving the government an interest-free loan. For Glenn, none of that framing mattered. The money he had withheld was gone before it reached him.
The Weeks After the Deposit — and Where Glenn Stands Now
When I asked Glenn to walk me through the weeks after he found the $440 in his account, his voice dropped. He had called the IRS helpline twice — once waiting on hold for 47 minutes before the call disconnected, and once reaching an agent who confirmed the offset but could offer no path to dispute it given the circumstances. He had texted Marcus twice. Marcus had not responded.
The roof repair has been postponed indefinitely. Glenn got a second patch job done in late February for $380 — paid out of the $440 deposit — which the contractor told him would hold “maybe through summer.” His sister Deja does not know what happened. Glenn told me he hasn’t told her because he doesn’t want her to feel responsible.
“She didn’t do anything wrong,” he said. “She’s the one in this family doing everything right.”
Anger Without a Target — and What Comes Next
Pastor Whitfield described Glenn to me as someone who “carries a lot and doesn’t ask for much.” That tracks with everything I observed. Glenn’s frustration is not irrational — it is the specific frustration of someone who followed the rules, filed on time, selected direct deposit to get his money faster, and still found the system working against him in a way he had no practical ability to prevent.
What Glenn did not know — and what he told me he wished someone had explained before he signed that cosigner agreement in 2022 — is that cosigning a federal loan creates a shared legal liability that can follow a person indefinitely, including into future tax years. The Bureau of the Fiscal Service’s Treasury Offset Program applies to refunds year over year until the debt is resolved or a formal dispute process concludes.
The church’s financial ministry connected Glenn with a pro bono legal aid organization in Little Rock in late March. As of our conversation, he had an intake appointment scheduled for April 14 — two weeks after Tax Day. Whether a hardship review or dispute process can recover any portion of the offset is not something I can predict, and it would not be appropriate for me to suggest it will. What Glenn has is an appointment, some documentation, and — finally — somewhere to direct the anger.
When I left the fellowship hall that Tuesday night, Glenn walked me to the parking lot. He looked up at a sky that was threatening rain and said nothing for a moment. Then: “I just want to fix my house.” There was nothing complicated about that. No jargon, no policy question. Just a man who works every day, does right by his sister, and wants his bedroom ceiling to stay dry.
That is the version of tax season that the average refund statistics do not capture — the people for whom the number on the IRS website and the number that hits their account are two completely different realities.
Related: Her Co-Signed Loan Went Bad, Her Business Stalled, and Then Medicare Ate Her Social Security Raise
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