The 2026 tax filing season officially closes on April 15, which means millions of Americans are still waiting on refunds they filed for weeks ago. For some filers, those refunds represent discretionary money. For others, they represent the difference between keeping the lights on and making a phone call they dread. When a mutual friend introduced me to Felicia Rollins at a neighborhood barbecue in Little Rock, Arkansas, in late March, I had no idea I was about to hear one of the more quietly painful refund stories of this filing season.
Felicia is 47 years old. She works as a security guard at a commercial office complex just outside downtown Little Rock, pulling overnight shifts that pay roughly $36,000 a year before taxes. She remarried three years ago, and she and her husband Marcus are raising a blended family — three kids total, two from her previous marriage, one from his. She mentioned all of this carefully, almost apologetically, as though she was handing me something fragile. She does not talk about money with her friends. The barbecue where we met was the first time she had told anyone outside her household about what had happened with her refund.
A Refund Built Into the Budget Before It Arrived
When I sat down with Felicia Rollins in a quiet booth at a diner near her home on March 28, the first thing she told me was that she had filed her 2025 return on February 3 — the first week the IRS began accepting electronic returns for the season. She used a free filing software and submitted a straightforward return: W-2 income, three dependents, the Child Tax Credit. The expected refund was $3,214.
That number was not abstract. It had already been assigned jobs. Felicia and Marcus had mapped it out on paper the week before she filed: $1,847 toward two months of COBRA premiums, roughly $600 toward a credit card balance carrying a 24.9% interest rate, and the rest held in reserve for a car repair that had been deferred since November.
The COBRA figure is the one that stopped me. Her rent on the family’s three-bedroom house in west Little Rock is $1,620 a month. The health insurance premium was $227 more than that. She lost her previous employer-sponsored coverage in October 2025 when her company restructured and eliminated her department’s benefits package. COBRA — the federal continuation coverage program — allowed her family to stay insured, but the cost transferred entirely to her household.
When “Approved” Stopped Meaning What She Thought It Meant
By February 24 — three weeks after filing — the IRS Where’s My Refund tool showed Felicia’s return as approved. She checked it at 6 a.m. before her shift ended, standing in the parking garage of the office complex she guards, using her phone. She called Marcus on the way home to tell him the money was coming.
It did not come. Two days later, the status changed to a message she had not seen before: “Your return has been selected for additional review.” The deposit date disappeared from the screen. She refreshed the page a dozen times over the next 48 hours. The message stayed.
Then, on March 4, a letter arrived at her house. It was IRS Letter 5071C — a notice asking her to verify her identity before the agency would release her refund. According to the IRS Identity Protection page, 5071C letters are sent when the agency’s systems flag a return as potentially suspicious, even when the filer is legitimate. Felicia had done nothing wrong. Her return was clean.
Felicia told me she sat with the letter on her kitchen table for two days before she opened it fully. “I thought it was something I had done wrong,” she said. “I have made mistakes with money in the past and I thought, here we go again.” She did not tell Marcus about the letter right away. She told me she felt ashamed, even though there was nothing to be ashamed of.
The Verification Process and What It Actually Takes
Felicia completed the online identity verification through the IRS portal on March 15 — eleven days after the letter arrived. The delay was not procrastination. She spent several evenings trying to set up an ID.me account, which the IRS uses as its identity verification partner for online services. She ran into a technical error on her first two attempts that she eventually traced to a browser compatibility issue.
According to the IRS, filers who successfully complete identity verification online can expect their refund within approximately nine weeks of the original filing date. Felicia’s experience tracked closer to that estimate. Once she verified on March 15, the agency sent a confirmation and the refund deposited on April 5 — nine weeks and two days after she filed on February 3.
What Happened in the 61 Days Between Filing and Deposit
The money arrived. But the 61-day gap did not pass without consequence. Felicia told me she paid February’s COBRA premium on time — that was manageable. March was where the plan broke down.
“We didn’t have $1,847 just sitting there for a second month in a row without the refund coming in,” she told me. “Marcus picked up extra shifts. I sold a camera I had from when I was doing photography a few years back. We got the bill paid, but it was ugly.” The family also missed a minimum payment on one of their credit cards in mid-March — not because they forgot, but because they made a conscious decision to keep the COBRA current and let the card slide one cycle. That late payment, Felicia said, was the thing that hurt the most. Her credit score, already damaged from financial difficulties earlier in her life and sitting at approximately 578, dropped an additional 14 points according to the credit monitoring service she uses.
The COBRA itself is a source of particular anguish. Under the federal COBRA statute, eligible employees can continue their employer-sponsored health coverage for up to 18 months after losing a job or losing benefits eligibility — but they pay the full premium, including the portion that was previously covered by the employer, plus a 2% administrative fee. For Felicia’s family plan, that meant going from a $340 monthly paycheck deduction to $1,847 overnight. She is actively looking for a new plan through the ACA marketplace, but Open Enrollment for 2026 ended in January, and she does not currently qualify for a Special Enrollment Period unless her COBRA coverage lapses.
The Refund Arrived — and So Did the Reckoning
When the $3,214 hit Felicia’s checking account on the morning of April 5, she did not feel relief first. She felt something closer to exhaustion. “I checked my phone and there it was,” she told me. “And I just thought — okay. Now we catch up.” She and Marcus sat down that evening and redistributed the money across the obligations that had piled up during the delay. The camera sale money went back into their emergency fund. The credit card late fee — $39 — came out of the refund. The car repair, still unaddressed, got scheduled for the following week.
The net outcome of the 61-day delay was not catastrophic. But it was not neutral either. A 14-point credit score drop. A late payment notation on a credit account. Two months of sustained financial stress that Felicia described as “living at a very low hum of panic.” And the specific, quiet indignity of not being able to tell her friends what was happening.
As I drove back through Little Rock after our interview, I kept returning to one detail Felicia had mentioned almost in passing: she had done everything right. Filed early. Filed electronically. Set up direct deposit. Responded to the IRS letter correctly. Completed verification on the first available window. And she still waited 61 days. The system worked — eventually. But “eventually” is an expensive word when a health insurance bill arrives on the first of every month regardless.
Felicia Rollins told me she plans to adjust her withholding for the 2026 tax year so that she receives a smaller refund — or no refund at all. She would rather have that money in each paycheck, spread across the year, than depend on a lump sum that the IRS can hold up without warning. It is a reasonable response to a real experience. Whether it is the right financial move for her specific situation is something only she and a qualified professional can assess. What I can say is that the reasoning behind it is the kind of thinking that only comes from getting burned once and deciding never to be that dependent on a single transaction again.
Related: My Neighbor Got a $6,500 Tax Refund While I Got $400 — The Federal Tax Credits She Claimed That I Ignored
Related: She Left USPS at 30 With $52,000 in Student Loans and a $1,847-a-Month COBRA Bill — and She’s Numb to All of It
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