A $3,200 IRS Refund Sat in ‘Processing’ for 70 Days While This El Paso Daycare Owner’s Bills Kept Coming

The conventional wisdom says file early, file electronically, and your refund will arrive in two weeks. Kevin Zielinski followed every one of those rules — and still found himself watching the IRS “Where’s My Refund” portal spin for over ten weeks while his daycare center struggled and his student loan payments came due without mercy.

I found Kevin through a comment he left on one of my earlier pieces about IRS processing delays. His comment stood out because it wasn’t venting — it was a precise, chronological account of exactly what happened and when. I followed up by email, and we connected over the phone for nearly an hour on a Tuesday evening in late March 2026. He answered every question I had. He was composed, almost methodical. That composure, I’d learn, was something he worked hard to maintain.

Kevin Zielinski is 41 years old. He runs a small licensed daycare center in El Paso, Texas, serving roughly 14 children each week. He holds a graduate degree in early childhood education — earned in his early thirties, mostly on federal loans that now total approximately $47,000. He is the primary caregiver for his aging mother, who moved in with him in the fall of 2024 after a health scare. He has a young daughter, and her other parent stopped making child support payments in the summer of 2025 — a gap of roughly $650 a month that Kevin has quietly been absorbing ever since.

The Numbers Behind a “Simple” Tax Year

For the 2025 tax year, Kevin told me he felt unusually confident about his return. He’d switched to small business accounting software partway through the year, kept his records cleaner than usual, and filed electronically through a major tax prep platform on January 28, 2026 — just days after the IRS began accepting returns. He claimed both the Earned Income Tax Credit and the Child Tax Credit, which pushed his expected refund to approximately $3,200.

His daycare pulls in around $4,200 a month in revenue, which sounds adequate until you account for supplies, rent, liability insurance, and what Kevin called “the quiet costs” of running a licensed childcare facility in Texas. The $650 monthly child support gap had already compressed his margin. He was counting on that refund to cover two months of student loan payments and rebuild a small reserve.

“I had everything ready. W-2s, 1099s, my business records. I thought this was finally going to be the easy year,” Kevin told me. The platform confirmed receipt almost immediately. The IRS tracker showed “Return Received” within 24 hours of submission.

What Kevin hadn’t fully accounted for was the layered nature of IRS refund timelines. According to CPA Practice Advisor’s 2026 refund schedule, returns claiming EITC or ACTC are legally held until at least mid-February before the IRS can disburse them. For Kevin, filing on January 28th meant his earliest realistic deposit date was around February 19th — and that was before any additional review entered the picture.

February 20th came and went. So did March 1st. The portal kept showing the same message.

When “Processing” Becomes a Black Hole

Kevin checked the IRS “Where’s My Refund” tool every day — sometimes twice before noon. For weeks it showed the same status: “Your return is still being processed.” No estimated date. No explanation. No indication that anything was wrong or that anything was moving forward.

As he explained to me, the silence was harder to absorb than a formal delay notice would have been. His student loan servicer doesn’t pause for IRS timelines. His mother’s prescriptions don’t either. He’d already been quietly covering the child support gap since the previous summer, and his savings buffer had thinned accordingly.

According to Yahoo Finance’s tax delay breakdown, a refund stuck in processing doesn’t automatically signal a serious problem — in many cases, the IRS is completing routine verification. But “routine” and “stress-free” aren’t the same thing when your margin is already thin. The IRS generally needs two weeks to process an electronically filed return under normal conditions. Beyond that window, a range of factors can trigger extended holds: changes in filing status, income fluctuations between years, discrepancies in reported figures, or credits flagged for additional verification.

Kevin’s income had dropped slightly in 2025 compared to 2024 — a consequence of two enrollment gaps at the daycare, one in February and one in September. That shift, he suspects, may have triggered something on his return. His situation wasn’t unusual. It just looked unusual on paper.

The Letter That Arrived on a Friday

In late February, Kevin received a CP05 notice in the mail. He described the envelope as unremarkable — standard IRS formatting, nothing alarming on the outside. He almost set it aside until the weekend.

The notice informed him that the IRS was reviewing his return and needed additional time. It did not specify why. It did not list a resolution timeline. It did not require any immediate action from him. According to the IRS’s guidance on notices and letters, taxpayers who receive a CP05 should read it carefully, review the information, and — critically — not file an amended return unless specifically instructed to do so.

“When I saw that envelope I felt my stomach drop,” Kevin told me. “I thought I’d done something wrong. I sat at my kitchen table for twenty minutes before I opened it.” The notice was not an audit. It was a standard hold for additional review — a distinction that took Kevin three days and a call to a tax professional to fully understand.

Tim Rupert, professor and group chair of accounting at Northeastern University, observed in a piece from Northeastern News that there “aren’t a lot of huge changes” in recent filing years — but that observation applies to the tax code, not to the experience of waiting. For filers claiming refundable credits like the EITC, the system’s mandatory review windows are a structural feature, not an exception. Kevin’s return was legally ordinary. His circumstances made it financially precarious.

The Slow Turn — and What It Cost

By mid-March, Kevin had made a decision he hadn’t planned on. He took out a short-term personal loan of $1,500 to cover expenses while the refund remained in limbo. The interest rate wasn’t severe, he said, but it added a real cost to a delay that wasn’t his fault. He also called his student loan servicer and moved one monthly payment to the end of his repayment term using a short-term deferral option.

“I hated doing that,” Kevin said. “The loan, the deferral — I’ve been working my whole adult life to not be that person. But you can’t run a business and care for people on fumes.” He paused before adding: “And I still haven’t told anyone close to me how tight it actually got.”

The IRS tracker changed in the first week of April 2026 — roughly ten weeks after Kevin originally filed. “Refund Approved” appeared. The full $3,200 appeared to be intact; the review had not reduced his refund. But the weeks of uncertainty carried costs that don’t appear on any IRS notice: the interest on the personal loan, the administrative friction of the deferral, and the sustained anxiety of not knowing what was happening with money he’d already earned.

• Kevin borrowed $1,500 at interest to bridge the gap — money he will repay from the refund itself
• One student loan payment was deferred, extending the back end of his repayment schedule
• Three days elapsed between receiving the CP05 notice and understanding what it actually meant
• The $650-per-month child support gap remained unresolved throughout the entire period

Kevin’s situation was compounded by variables the IRS system has no visibility into: a missing child support payment, a dependent parent, a business with seasonally variable enrollment. The return appeared unusual on paper because his life is genuinely complex. That complexity — not an error, not an omission — appears to have triggered the hold.

When I asked Kevin what he would do differently, he paused before answering. He said he’d build a dedicated “refund buffer” — a few hundred dollars kept liquid specifically for the gap between when a refund is expected and when it actually arrives. He’d also respond to IRS notices faster and stop trying to interpret them on his own. The CP05 sat on his kitchen counter for three days before he called a professional. Those three days, he said, were the most stressful of the entire ordeal.

“I think I waited so long to ask for help because I didn’t want to seem like I didn’t have everything under control,” Kevin told me. “But the IRS doesn’t care if you look like you have it together. They’re going to take as long as they take.”

When I ended our call, I kept returning to that observation — not as guidance, but as an honest portrait of what a ten-week refund delay looks like from the inside for someone managing a business, a parent, a child, and a loan default with no backup. The $3,200 was never really in danger. The cost of waiting for it was real and lasting, and the IRS form that eventually arrived couldn’t account for any of it.

Related: She Counted on Her Tax Refund to Pay Rent. Then a Debt Collector Claimed It First.

Related: The IRS Held Felicia’s $3,200 Refund for 61 Days While Her COBRA Bill Kept Coming Due