The man in front of me at the BP station on West Madison was speaking loud enough that I couldn’t pretend not to hear him. It was a Tuesday morning in late February 2026, and Carlos Stanton — though I didn’t know his name yet — was pacing a tight circle near the air pump, phone pressed to his ear, saying something about the IRS website saying “refund approved” but nothing showing up in his bank account. He looked frustrated in the specific, exhausted way that only happens when you’ve been waiting on money you were counting on.
I introduced myself after he hung up. He laughed a little and said, “Man, I’ve been on hold with them for three days straight.” That was enough. We exchanged numbers in the parking lot, and two weeks later, I sat down with Carlos Stanton at a diner on the North Side to hear the whole story.
A Refund Built on Thin Margins
Carlos is 44, a licensed social worker employed by a nonprofit in Chicago’s Humboldt Park neighborhood. He remarried in 2022, and his household now includes five kids — two from his first marriage, two from his wife’s previous relationship, and one they share together. On paper, his income qualifies him for a substantial refund each year through the Earned Income Tax Credit and the Child Tax Credit. In practice, that refund has become something the family budgets around before it even arrives.
His base salary sits around $38,000 annually. He also runs a small mobile notary and document prep service on the side — something he started during the pandemic to bring in extra cash. But as he told me over coffee, that hustle has been sliding for more than a year.
On top of the declining side income, Carlos’s oldest child — 17, from his first marriage — has a documented disability that qualifies the family for a small supplemental benefit. The monthly payment amounts to roughly $340. Carlos told me flatly that it covers maybe half of the out-of-pocket costs associated with his son’s care in any given month.
The January Filing and the PATH Act Hold
Carlos filed his 2025 federal return on January 22, 2026, using a paid tax preparer he’s used for four years. The return claimed $2,100 in Earned Income Tax Credit and $1,312 in Child Tax Credit — figures his preparer confirmed were accurate given his household size and adjusted gross income of just over $41,000 when combining his salary and what remained of his notary work.
What Carlos didn’t fully understand when he filed — and what his preparer apparently did not emphasize clearly enough — is that under the IRS PATH Act rules, refunds that include the EITC or the Additional Child Tax Credit cannot be issued before mid-February, regardless of when the return was filed. In 2026, the IRS began releasing those held refunds on February 18.
Carlos knew the refund would be delayed until mid-February — but when February 18 came and went with no deposit and the IRS website still showing “refund approved,” he started to get worried. That’s when I overheard him at the gas station. His return had cleared the initial PATH Act hold, but it was now sitting in what the IRS calls “additional processing” — a secondary review that can be triggered by mismatches in reported income, identity verification flags, or errors in the return itself.
What “Additional Processing” Actually Looks Like From the Outside
When I followed up with Carlos in early March, he had called the IRS three times and spent a combined total of roughly four hours on hold. Each time, he was told the same thing: his return was under review and there was no estimated completion date available to the representative he was speaking with.
According to the IRS refund FAQ, the agency says most refunds are issued within 21 days of e-filing — but that window explicitly excludes returns flagged for additional review. The IRS does not publish specific data on how many returns trigger secondary processing, though tax professionals estimate it affects a meaningful portion of EITC claims each year, partly because the credit has historically been subject to elevated error rates.
Carlos’s preparer eventually identified the likely cause: a small discrepancy between the 1099-NEC Carlos received for his notary work — which reported $2,840 in income from one corporate client — and the total self-employment income he had reported on Schedule C. The numbers were off by $180 due to a data entry error. It was enough to trigger a review flag.
The Letter That Changed Everything — And the Weeks That Followed
On March 6, 2026 — 43 days after filing — Carlos received a Letter 4883C from the IRS. The letter requested that he call a specific verification number within 30 days to confirm his identity before the refund could be released. According to the IRS explanation of Letter 4883C, the agency sends this notice when it needs to verify that the taxpayer — and not someone else — filed the return in question.
Carlos called the number the same day the letter arrived. He waited on hold for 58 minutes before reaching a representative. The verification process itself took about 12 minutes and required him to confirm his prior year’s adjusted gross income, the amount of his refund, and details from a prior return. He passed.
The IRS told Carlos to allow up to nine weeks from the date of the letter for his refund to arrive. In reality, the deposit landed on March 30 — 24 days after the verification call, and 67 days after his original filing date. The amount was $3,391, roughly $21 less than his original projection. His preparer told him the small adjustment was likely tied to the Schedule C discrepancy being corrected during review.
Where the Money Went — and What It Couldn’t Fix
When the $3,391 landed in Carlos’s checking account on a Monday morning, his first call was to his landlord. He was one month behind on rent — $1,250 — and had been carrying that balance since February. The second chunk went to a past-due utility bill of $380. Then $600 toward a credit card he’d been using to cover groceries and his son’s therapy co-pays during the wait.
What remained after those immediate obligations was approximately $1,161 — less than a third of the total refund. For a household of seven running on roughly $3,200 a month in combined take-home income, it wasn’t a windfall. It was a patch.
Carlos told me he has a complicated relationship with the annual refund cycle — aware, on some level, that structuring household finances around a once-a-year lump sum is a fragile system, but also aware that the math of his situation doesn’t leave him many alternatives.
The notary business, he told me, is still declining. He cleared just $190 in February and $215 in March. He’s thinking about pivoting to a mobile fingerprinting service but hasn’t committed to the licensing costs yet — about $300 in Illinois. That’s the creative, impulsive energy I noticed in him from the beginning: always scanning for the next angle, sometimes before fully closing out the current one.
As I wrapped up my notes at that North Side diner, Carlos ordered a second cup of coffee and said something that has stayed with me. He was talking about his son, the one with the disability, and about how the $340 monthly benefit never quite covers the actual cost of care. “The system is built for people who have a little extra room,” he said. “We don’t have room. We’re playing Tetris with the bills every single month.”
He wasn’t asking for sympathy. He was just describing the arithmetic of his life with the same pragmatic clarity he uses for everything else. The refund came. It helped. It wasn’t enough. And he’s already thinking about what next tax season needs to look like — specifically, making sure his 1099-NEC and Schedule C numbers match exactly before the return goes anywhere near the IRS.
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