What would you do if the refund check you counted on for months was already claimed — by someone who isn’t you? It’s a situation millions of Americans face each year, and the answer is rarely quick or clean. When a veterans’ support group coordinator in Cleveland connected me with Marcus Novak earlier this year, I wasn’t sure what I’d find. What I discovered was a man who had been quietly navigating one of the most frustrating corners of the American tax system — not with rage, but with a kind of weathered acceptance that told me he’d been let down before.
Marcus Novak is 65 years old. He runs machines on a factory floor in Cleveland, Ohio, has done so for most of his adult life, and shares a house with a roommate to keep costs manageable. He served in the military, which is how his name came up at the veterans’ support group meeting where a coordinator suggested I speak with him. “He’s got a tax story you won’t believe,” she told me. She was right.
The Refund That Was Already Gone
Marcus filed his 2024 federal tax return in early February 2025. He’d done the math and expected a refund of roughly $2,840 — money he’d earmarked to pay down a medical bill that had been sitting on his kitchen table since the previous October. He filed electronically, got a confirmation number, and waited.
Two weeks later, the IRS rejected his return. The reason: a return had already been filed using his Social Security number.
Marcus told me he stared at the rejection notice for a long time before it fully registered. “I didn’t panic at first,” he said. “I thought it was a glitch. Then I called the IRS and they told me someone had already filed in January. That’s when my stomach dropped.”
The fraudulent return had been filed in mid-January 2025, weeks before Marcus sat down with his W-2. Whoever filed it had enough of his personal information — his name, SSN, employer, and a rough estimate of his income — to construct a plausible-looking return and claim a refund. The IRS had already processed it.
Filing Form 14039 — and Waiting
The IRS’s prescribed response to tax-related identity theft is IRS Form 14039, the Identity Theft Affidavit. Marcus learned about it through a volunteer at his veterans’ support group who had walked someone else through the same process. He printed the form, completed it by hand, and mailed it to the IRS along with a copy of his driver’s license and his actual tax return — submitted on paper, as required, since his electronic filing was blocked.
According to IRS.gov, identity theft cases are routed to the IRS’s specialized Identity Theft Victim Assistance unit, and resolution can take anywhere from 120 days to well over a year depending on complexity and case volume. Marcus’s case landed somewhere in the middle.
During those nine months, Marcus kept working his shifts and kept getting letters from the IRS — form letters, mostly, that told him his case was “still being processed.” He told me he’d come home from the factory floor, find another envelope from Cincinnati, Ohio (where the IRS Identity Theft unit is based), and feel his energy drain. “Every letter looked the same,” he said. “They all said they needed more time. After a while I just put them in a folder and stopped hoping.”
The Financial Pressure Behind the Wait
Marcus isn’t wealthy. His factory wages put him in a lower-middle income bracket, and the $2,840 he was owed represented real financial breathing room — not a vacation, but a cleared debt. The medical bill he’d planned to address with the refund continued to accumulate interest while the IRS sorted out his case.
This year’s refund season has been historically significant across the board. According to reporting by Axios, average refunds are up roughly 10% in 2026, hitting approximately $3,800 per filer — money that many Americans had hoped to put toward car purchases or other major expenses. For people like Marcus, who deal with identity complications, delayed amended returns, or IRS flags, that money often arrives late, reduced, or under stressful circumstances.
The identity theft that derailed Marcus’s refund had not come from a data breach he could point to. He suspects it may have been connected to information shared years earlier through a job application or a now-defunct online account. By the time he knew something was wrong, the damage was already done.
What Changed — and What Still Hasn’t
In November 2025, Marcus received a check for $2,927 — his original $2,840 refund plus $87 in interest the IRS owed him for the delay. He used most of it to pay down the medical bill, which had grown slightly due to the months of waiting. “It felt like getting your own money back after someone stole it,” he told me. “Not a windfall. Just… mine.”
Marcus has since enrolled in the IRS’s Identity Protection PIN (IP PIN) program, which assigns a six-digit code that must be included on any future tax return filed in his name. According to IRS.gov, the IP PIN program is available to all taxpayers who want additional security — not just those who have already been victimized. Marcus wishes someone had told him about it years earlier.
His credit, damaged by the same identity theft incident, remains a longer-term problem. He doesn’t own a car and doesn’t plan to finance anything until it’s repaired. When I asked him what he’d say to someone in a similar situation just starting the IRS process, he paused for a long moment. “Keep every piece of paper,” he finally said. “Every letter, every date, every call. Because when you finally get to someone who can help, they’re going to want to know the whole story.”
The Bigger Picture for 2026 Filers
Marcus’s case is not rare. Tax-related identity theft affects hundreds of thousands of Americans each filing season, and the IRS has acknowledged that its resolution timelines are longer than they should be. The Taxpayer Advocate Service has repeatedly cited identity theft as one of the most serious problems facing the agency.
For veterans and lower-income filers specifically, a frozen refund can cascade quickly into missed bills, additional debt, and credit consequences — compounding problems that already exist. Resources like Benefits.gov can help identify federal support programs for people navigating financial strain while waiting on IRS resolutions.
When I left Marcus at the community center where we’d met — the same room where his veterans’ group holds its monthly meetings — he seemed neither hopeful nor defeated. Just steady. He’s 65, he’s been through a lot, and he’s still showing up to work. The system failed him in a specific and measurable way, and he navigated it the best he could with the information he had. That’s the whole story, and it doesn’t need a happier ending than that.
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