Most people assume the IRS only rewards the meticulous — those who keep every receipt, hire expensive accountants, and approach April 15 like a project manager. But the real cost of tax confusion doesn’t fall on high earners who can afford to find every loophole. It falls on people like Monique Washington, a 43-year-old UPS driver from Baltimore who has spent nearly two decades putting someone else’s life before her own finances.
When I sat down with Monique at a diner near her East Baltimore home on a Tuesday morning in late March, she had just gotten off a 10-hour delivery shift. She ordered coffee, no food. She told me she’d been up since 4 a.m. helping her younger brother Marcus get ready before she left for the depot.
The Life She Didn’t Plan For
Marcus Washington was 25 when a driver ran a red light and changed both of their lives permanently. A traumatic brain injury left him with significant cognitive impairment and limited mobility. He was 25. Monique was 30. Their mother died two years after the accident, their father the year after that. Within three years, Monique became the only person left.
“I didn’t sit down and decide to do this,” she told me, wrapping both hands around her coffee mug. “It just became the thing that had to happen. You don’t really process it — you just start doing it.”
Marcus receives Social Security Disability Insurance (SSDI) — approximately $1,190 per month as of early 2026, based on his pre-accident work record. But that income, according to Monique, doesn’t come close to covering what he actually needs. She described the gap in detail: a wheelchair-accessible van service that costs her roughly $420 a month for medical appointments, incontinence supplies and feeding equipment Medicaid doesn’t cover, and a part-time aide on weekends when Monique works overtime shifts.
She added it all up for me on her phone’s calculator app: roughly $9,200 a year, on top of her mortgage, groceries, utilities, and her own basic expenses. She earns solid wages as a senior driver with Teamsters Local 311 — she declined to give me her exact salary — but described it as “enough to keep us above water, not enough to breathe.”
Six Years of Filing Alone — and Filing Wrong
For most of the past decade, Monique filed her federal taxes herself using a commercial software program. She said she always claimed single, took the standard deduction, and moved on. The idea of claiming Marcus as a dependent had never seriously occurred to her — she assumed his SSDI income made him ineligible.
That assumption, as she discovered this past February, was costing her money every single year.
A coworker at her UPS facility mentioned a free tax clinic run through a local nonprofit in partnership with the IRS Volunteer Income Tax Assistance (VITA) program. Monique went skeptically. She told me she expected to sit for an hour and leave with the same number she always got.
What the VITA volunteer explained — and what I later confirmed by reviewing the relevant IRS guidance — is that a person can potentially qualify as a Qualifying Relative dependent under IRS rules even if they receive SSDI, provided their gross income falls below the threshold (set at $5,050 for tax year 2025) and the taxpayer provides more than half of their total support. Marcus’s SSDI payments count toward his support calculation, but Monique’s $9,200 in out-of-pocket costs gave her a strong case that she was providing the majority of it.
According to the IRS Publication 501, which covers exemptions and dependents, SSDI itself is not automatically disqualifying for dependent status — the analysis turns on gross income and the support test, which are separate questions. Monique had never known to ask.
The Refund — and the Feeling That Came With It
Monique e-filed her 2025 federal return on February 18, 2026. The IRS accepted it the same day. She told me she checked the IRS Where’s My Refund tool twice a day after that — once before her shift, once after.
The refund hit her account on March 3, 2026: $2,340.
That included a $500 Credit for Other Dependents (sometimes called the Family Tax Credit) for claiming Marcus, plus a larger refund driven by medical expense deductions she had never taken before. The VITA volunteer had walked her through Schedule A, where qualifying unreimbursed medical expenses exceeding 7.5% of adjusted gross income can be deducted for taxpayers who itemize. Monique’s out-of-pocket care costs — the transportation, the medical supplies — put her well past that threshold.
When I asked Monique how it felt to see that deposit, she was quiet for a moment. Not the pause of someone searching for words — more like someone deciding how honest to be.
The Costs That Don’t Show Up on Any Form
There is a version of Monique Washington’s story that ends neatly — woman discovers credits, gets refund, problem solved. That version would be incomplete.
She has not taken a real vacation in six years. She told me the last trip she took was a four-day visit to a cousin in Atlanta in 2019, before the pandemic, when she could arrange reliable coverage for Marcus. Since then, the logistics have never aligned. She doesn’t date. She works days specifically to be home in the evenings, which has cost her seniority picks on higher-paying night routes. She cannot relocate for a better assignment or cheaper housing.
Her union contract provides a pension, but she has not made voluntary supplemental contributions in four years. Every dollar she might have sent to a retirement account went to Marcus’s weekend aide instead.
I asked her what she did with the $2,340. She said she put $800 toward a new shower chair for Marcus, paid down a credit card balance she’d been carrying since last fall, and kept the rest in her checking account. “I didn’t do anything fun with it,” she said. “There wasn’t a fun option.”
What 2026 Filing Season Looks Like for Family Caregivers
Monique’s story is not unusual in its shape — it’s unusual only in that she finally got the information she needed. According to estimates from the National Alliance for Caregiving, approximately 53 million Americans provide unpaid care to an adult or child with special needs. A significant portion of them are likely in Monique’s position: providing substantial financial support, unaware of the tax provisions that exist specifically for their circumstances.
The 2025 tax filing deadline for most individual filers is April 15, 2026. VITA sites, which offer free tax preparation services to households earning roughly $67,000 or less annually, are still operating through mid-April in most cities. The IRS VITA locator tool allows taxpayers to find sites by ZIP code.
When I left Monique at the diner, she was checking her phone — a message from Marcus’s aide about a morning appointment that had been rescheduled. She said goodbye quickly, already mentally back in the logistics of her day. She didn’t seem bitter, exactly. She seemed like someone who had long ago made her peace with a life that doesn’t pause for reflection.
The $2,340 was real. So was the math she did on what she might have recovered if she’d known earlier. Neither fact cancels out the other, and I wasn’t going to pretend otherwise. Some financial stories don’t have clean endings — they just have a number, and the quiet weight of what that number represents.
Related: She’s Been Her Brother’s Sole Caregiver for 18 Years — and Medicaid Barely Covers Half His Needs
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