The first thing Monique Washington showed me when I arrived at her rowhouse in East Baltimore was a spreadsheet on her kitchen table — two columns, color-coded in yellow and red. Yellow was what her brother Marcus’s SSDI and Medicaid covered each month. Red was what it didn’t. The red column was longer. “I’ve been staring at that sheet for three years,” she told me. “The numbers don’t change much. Neither does my situation.”
Monique is 43 years old and has been a UPS package car driver for fourteen years. She earns a competitive union wage — enough, in another life, to save steadily for retirement. But Marcus, now 34, was in a car accident at 25 that left him requiring daily physical assistance, accessible transportation, and a rotating supply of medical equipment that Medicaid covers incompletely and unpredictably. Their parents are both gone. Monique is what remains between Marcus and a care facility she refuses to consider.
A Refund She’d Already Spent in Her Head
When I spoke with Monique in late March 2026, she had been waiting sixty-three days for a federal tax refund the IRS’s own Where’s My Refund tool confirmed was approved. She had e-filed her 2025 return on February 7 and requested direct deposit. The tool showed “Refund Approved” by February 19. Then, nothing.
The expected amount was $2,440. She had already allocated every dollar of it in her head: $780 for a new shower chair and transfer bench Marcus’s occupational therapist had recommended for months, $600 toward a three-month supply of disposable medical supplies Medicaid reimbursed inconsistently, and the remaining $1,060 earmarked as a cash buffer for the spring quarter, when her overtime hours typically dip before peak summer volume.
Monique told me she had called the IRS helpline twice during that stretch. The first call, on March 3, ended after 47 minutes on hold with an automated message saying her return was “still processing.” The second call, on March 18, reached a live agent who confirmed her return had been routed for additional review — but could not tell her why, or when it would clear.
What Her Brother’s Benefits Actually Cover
To understand why the delay hit so hard, I needed to understand the gap Monique fills every month. Marcus receives Social Security Disability Insurance based on his pre-accident work record. In 2026, his monthly SSDI payment is approximately $1,180 — below the national average monthly SSDI benefit, which the Social Security Administration reported as roughly $1,580 for disabled workers in 2025. He is also enrolled in Medicaid, which covers his primary care and most prescriptions.
What Medicaid does not reliably cover, Monique explained, includes non-emergency accessible transportation to specialist appointments across town, the specific brand of wound care supplies Marcus’s doctor prescribes, and the roughly twelve hours per week of supplemental personal care aide time that exceeds his approved Medicaid waiver allocation. Monique covers those gaps directly.
She estimated she spends between $600 and $700 per month out of pocket on Marcus’s supplemental needs. She has not made a contribution to her Teamsters pension beyond the mandatory employer contribution in nearly four years. She has not taken a vacation that lasted more than a long weekend in six years. She is not complaining about any of this, at least not directly. She simply states it the way you might state the weather.
Navigating the IRS With No Room for Error
Monique has filed her own taxes using tax software since her early thirties. She is meticulous about it — she showed me her folder of receipts and mileage logs she keeps specifically for Marcus-related expenses, hoping each year to qualify for the medical expense deduction under IRS Schedule A. To claim that deduction, qualifying medical expenses must exceed 7.5 percent of adjusted gross income, according to IRS Topic No. 502.
In some years, Monique has cleared that threshold. In others, the standard deduction is more favorable. For her 2025 return, she itemized — and that itemization, she suspects, is what triggered the additional review. “Every time I itemize, it takes longer,” she told me. “I understand why they check. I just wish the checking didn’t take three months.”
She had not received a formal notice — no CP05, no Letter 4464C — just the limbo of a refund that the IRS confirmed was approved but had not moved. This is a documented pattern: the agency’s own Taxpayer Advocate Service has flagged multi-week gaps between approval status and actual disbursement as a persistent system issue, particularly during periods of high filing volume in February and March.
The Money Arrived. The Resentment Was Already Settled In.
I followed up with Monique in early May. The refund had finally hit her account on May 2 — eighty-four days after she filed. The deposited amount was $2,187, reduced from her anticipated $2,440. A CP21B notice arrived a week later explaining a $253 adjustment the IRS made to one of her deduction calculations. She had no reason to dispute it. She just absorbed it.
By the time the money arrived, she had already delayed purchasing the shower chair by six weeks and had stretched Marcus’s medical supply inventory further than she was comfortable with. The $1,060 buffer she had planned for the spring quarter was gone before she saw a dollar — absorbed by the month-to-month costs that didn’t pause while she waited.
The retirement question came up near the end of our second conversation. I asked Monique directly whether she thought about it. She paused longer than she had paused at any other point in our two meetings. “I think about it,” she said quietly. “And then I think about Marcus, and I stop thinking about it. You can only hold so many things at once.”
What Monique’s Story Reflects About the System
Monique Washington is not in financial freefall. She has a stable job, union protections, and an employer-matched pension she has not actively contributed to in years but has not cashed out. Her situation is something more corrosive than crisis — it is the slow compression of a person who earns enough but never accumulates anything, because accumulation requires slack in the system, and Monique has none.
The tax refund she waited eighty-four days for was not a windfall. It was a delayed return of her own withholding — money she had already earned and overpaid to the government across the year. The wait cost her purchases she had planned, eroded a buffer she had no other way to rebuild, and delivered $253 less than she expected with a notice she had to decode alone.
When I left Monique’s house, the spreadsheet was still on the kitchen table. She had already started updating it for the next quarter — new numbers in the yellow column, the red column still longer. She walked me to the door and said she hoped the story would be useful to someone. That’s the thing about Monique Washington: even when talking about her own life, she’s thinking about someone else.
Leave a Reply