Most people treat a tax refund like a bonus check — something to look forward to, something that will arrive eventually. What that framing misses entirely is what happens when eventually becomes never seems to come, and the bills underneath don’t pause to wait. For a growing number of working parents, the IRS refund delay isn’t an inconvenience. It’s a cash flow crisis.
I met Samantha Reeves on a Tuesday morning in early April. She’d just finished a twelve-hour overnight shift at a community hospital in Denver and was still in her scrubs when we sat down at her kitchen table. Her four-year-old daughter, Mia, was at daycare — the same daycare that had been sending increasingly pointed reminder emails about payment timing. Samantha had a cup of coffee in her hand and a refund still sitting somewhere inside the IRS’s review queue.
A Return Filed Early, a Refund That Didn’t Follow
Samantha Reeves filed her 2025 federal return on January 27th — early even by diligent standards. She’d used a well-known tax preparation software, claimed the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC) and the Child Tax Credit (CTC) for Mia, and received an email confirmation that her return had been accepted. The IRS’s Where’s My Refund tool showed a projected deposit date in the third week of February.
That date passed without any deposit. Then another projected date appeared. Then the tool stopped showing a projected date at all and displayed a generic message about processing. Samantha called the IRS phone line four times over three weeks. Each call ended the same way — a recorded message citing high call volume, or a brief conversation with a representative who could only confirm the return was “under review.”
The EITC is one of the most scrutinized credits on the federal return. Under the PATH Act, the IRS is legally prohibited from issuing refunds that include EITC or Additional Child Tax Credit (ACTC) claims before mid-February. But even after that window opens, returns claiming these credits face a higher rate of identity verification and income-matching review. According to the Taxpayer Advocate Service, EITC audits and correspondence reviews disproportionately affect lower- and middle-income filers who have few resources to absorb the delay.
The Numbers That Don’t Bend
Samantha earns a solid wage as a registered nurse — roughly $72,000 base salary in 2025, plus overtime that pushed her gross to approximately $81,000. But Denver is not a cheap city, and her expenses don’t leave much margin. She laid them out for me without hesitation, the way someone does when they’ve run the same math so many times it’s become automatic.
- Rent: $1,650/month for a two-bedroom apartment in a safe school district
- Daycare for Mia: $1,400/month — nearly equal to her rent
- Student loans: $38,000 remaining balance, currently on income-driven repayment
- Car payment and insurance: roughly $510/month combined
- Groceries, utilities, phone: approximately $700/month
Her ex-partner has been absent for two years. There is no child support coming in. Every dollar that enters the household is a dollar Samantha worked for, and every dollar that gets delayed has a direct downstream consequence. “I’m not irresponsible,” she told me, leaning forward slightly. “I do everything right. I file early, I keep every document. And I still ended up borrowing $600 from my mom to cover daycare in March because the IRS just had my money sitting somewhere.”
What “Under Review” Actually Means
When the IRS places a return under review, filers often receive little specific information — and that opacity is one of the most frustrating parts of the experience. Samantha’s return was eventually flagged with a CP05 notice, which the IRS sends when it needs to verify income, withholding, or tax credits before releasing a refund. The notice does not mean fraud was suspected. It means the agency’s automated systems wanted additional confirmation before processing.
Samantha received her CP05 notice in early March — more than five weeks after she filed. That notice reset the clock. She now faced a potential additional 60-day review window on top of the time already elapsed. She told me she stared at the letter for a long time before putting it down. “I just kept thinking, I worked overtime for months. That money is mine. And I’m getting a letter telling me to wait more.”
The CP05 process is more common than most filers realize. The IRS processed approximately 163 million individual returns in fiscal year 2024, according to IRS filing season statistics, and a meaningful share of those — particularly those claiming EITC — entered some form of manual or extended review. Delays of 45 to 90 days are not unusual for this subset of filers.
The Moment the Money Arrived — and What It Revealed
The deposit came on a Monday. Samantha was at work when her bank app sent the notification. She told me she stepped into a supply closet for a moment when she saw it. “I just needed a second,” she said. “It’s embarrassing to say, but I actually started crying a little. Not happy-crying. Just — relief. And also kind of angry that it took that long.”
The $4,218 covered the $600 she owed her mother, paid Mia’s April daycare invoice in full, and put roughly $1,400 into a small emergency savings buffer she’d been trying to build for over a year. The rest went toward a loan payment she’d deferred. By any measure, the money was fully absorbed within days of arriving.
What struck me most, sitting with Samantha that morning, was how methodical she’d been throughout the entire ordeal — even while exhausted from overnight shifts. She kept a folder with every IRS notice, printed every Where’s My Refund screenshot, and logged every phone call with dates and reference numbers. None of it sped up the process, but it meant she had a complete record when she eventually spoke to a tax professional about filing Form 3911, the refund trace request.
What Samantha Would Do Differently
I asked Samantha directly: knowing what she knows now, would she change anything about how she approached her return? She thought about it for a moment. “I’d still file early,” she said. “But I’d have a bigger cushion going into February. I had maybe three weeks of expenses saved. That’s not enough when you’re waiting 78 days for a check the government already owes you.”
She’s also reconsidering her withholding. A large refund sounds like a win — and $4,218 is real money — but as Samantha pointed out, that’s money she loaned the government interest-free for the better part of a year, then had to wait another 11 weeks to get back. She mentioned she’d spoken to her hospital’s HR department about adjusting her W-4 to bring home slightly more each paycheck. She didn’t frame it as a financial strategy. She framed it as survival math.
Before I left, Samantha’s phone buzzed — her shift reminder for the following morning. She was already scheduled to come back in less than sixteen hours. She walked me to the door and, almost as an afterthought, said something that stayed with me on the drive back. “I became a nurse to give Mia stability. That’s the whole point. And then you realize the systems that are supposed to support that — the tax credits, the refund schedule — they’re built for people who have a cushion already. If you don’t, you just hold your breath.”
Samantha Reeves did everything correctly. She filed on time, claimed credits she legally qualified for, and documented everything. The 78-day wait wasn’t a penalty for anything she did wrong. It was simply the reality of how the system processes returns for people like her — and how little that timeline accounts for the cost of waiting.
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