A Divorced Truck Driver Was Paying $1,200 a Month in Child Support and Had No Idea He Qualified for $2,000 in Tax Credits
Most people assume that if you don’t have your kids living with you full-time, the tax benefits of parenthood simply don’t apply to you. That assumption is wrong — and for millions of divorced non-custodial parents, it’s costing real money every filing season. Tommy Reeves learned this the hard way, and by the time he understood the full picture, he had already left close to $4,000 in refundable credits unclaimed across two tax years.
I met Tommy on a Tuesday morning in early March 2026, inside a church fellowship hall in East Tampa that had been converted, temporarily, into a free tax preparation site run by trained IRS-certified volunteers. He was sitting in a folding chair, a manila folder balanced on his knee, waiting for his name to be called. He had the measured patience of someone used to long hauls — which makes sense, because Tommy drives long-distance freight routes for a regional carrier and has done so for nearly a decade.
He agreed to talk with me after his appointment, over coffee from a communal pot that had clearly been brewed sometime the previous week.
A Budget That Was Technically Working — Until It Wasn’t
On paper, Tommy Reeves is doing okay. He earns approximately $58,000 a year before taxes — a solid middle-income wage that reflects years of experience and a commercial driver’s license he worked hard to obtain. But “okay on paper” and “okay in practice” diverged sharply after his divorce finalized in late 2022.
Under his divorce agreement, Tommy pays $1,200 per month in child support for his two children — a 9-year-old daughter and a 7-year-old son — who live primarily with their mother in Hillsborough County. That’s $14,400 a year flowing out before he accounts for rent, food, insurance, or the medical bills that started piling up after a back injury he sustained loading freight in the summer of 2023.
$14,400
Annual child support payments
$620/mo
Partial disability benefit received
~$2,000
Estimated credits missed per year
The back injury left Tommy with a partial disability designation through his employer’s workers’ compensation insurer. He receives $620 per month in partial disability payments — a figure that sounds meaningful until you factor in that his out-of-pocket medical costs for physical therapy and specialist visits ran close to $4,800 in 2024 alone. The disability payments covered roughly 55 cents of every dollar he spent on recovery.
“I was just trying to stay afloat,” Tommy told me. “I figured I was doing everything right — paying my support on time, going to PT, filing my taxes every April. I didn’t realize the filing part was where I was actually losing ground.”
The Misconception That Cost Him Two Filing Seasons
Here is where Tommy’s story takes a turn that is equal parts common and preventable. Because his children live with their mother, Tommy assumed — as many non-custodial parents do — that he was ineligible for the Child Tax Credit. He filed as a single taxpayer with no dependents claimed, year after year, using a basic online filing service he’d been using since his early twenties.
What Tommy didn’t know is that under IRS rules, a non-custodial parent can claim the Child Tax Credit if the custodial parent signs a written declaration — IRS Form 8332 — releasing the exemption. This arrangement is not automatic, and it requires cooperation from the other parent, but it is legal and relatively common in divorce agreements. Tommy’s ex-wife, he told me, had never been asked about it — because Tommy had never known to ask.
“Nobody told me that was even an option. My divorce lawyer didn’t mention it, the online tax software just asked if my kids lived with me, I said no, and it moved on. That was it. Two years gone.”
— Tommy Reeves, truck driver, Tampa, FL
The Child Tax Credit is worth up to $2,000 per qualifying child for tax year 2025, with up to $1,700 of that potentially refundable through the Additional Child Tax Credit, according to IRS guidance. For two children, Tommy’s potential credit could reach $4,000 — though his actual refundable amount depends on his earned income and adjusted gross income, which the volunteer preparer was still calculating when I spoke with him.
⚠ IMPORTANT
Claiming the Child Tax Credit as a non-custodial parent requires a signed IRS Form 8332 from the custodial parent. Without it, the IRS will not recognize the claim. Divorce decrees alone do not satisfy this requirement for tax years after 2008.
How the Disability Payments Complicated Everything
Tommy’s partial disability income added another layer of confusion to his tax situation. Workers’ compensation payments are generally not included in taxable income under federal law, but the interaction between those payments, his regular wages, and his eligibility for the Earned Income Tax Credit created a scenario that basic tax software — designed for straightforward returns — handled poorly.
The EITC, one of the most substantial refundable credits available to working adults, phases in based on earned income and phases out above certain thresholds. For a single filer with two qualifying children in tax year 2025, the maximum EITC is $6,604, according to IRS EITC tables
. Tommy’s income — once the workers’ comp payments are correctly excluded — may put him in a favorable position for a partial credit.
“The volunteer preparer, she sat with me for almost an hour,” Tommy said. “She kept pulling up these forms I’d never heard of. At one point she asked me if my ex would sign something so I could claim the kids, and I honestly laughed. I thought she was joking.”
KEY TAKEAWAY
Workers’ compensation benefits are generally excluded from federal taxable income, but they can still affect eligibility calculations for credits like the EITC. A certified tax preparer — not standard software — is often necessary to navigate these interactions correctly.
Tommy had filed incorrectly not out of carelessness, but because the systems designed for everyday filers weren’t built to catch edge cases. His situation — divorced non-custodial parent, partial disability income, child support obligations — sat at the intersection of three separate areas of tax law that rarely get addressed in the same software workflow.
What the Clinic Actually Found — and What It Couldn’t Fix
By the end of Tommy’s appointment, the picture was becoming clearer, though not entirely resolved. The volunteer preparer identified that Tommy had likely left approximately $1,900 to $2,100 in credits unclaimed for tax year 2024 alone, primarily through the Additional Child Tax Credit and a partial EITC he hadn’t known to pursue.
The harder news was about the prior year. Tommy had filed his 2023 return in April 2024 using the same approach — no dependents, no credits claimed. The three-year window to amend a return and claim a refund is still open for 2023, which means Tommy may have the opportunity to file an amended return using IRS Form 1040-X. But that requires his ex-wife’s cooperation on Form 8332, which — as of the morning I spoke with him — had not yet been discussed.
Tommy’s Path Forward — Key Steps Identified at the Clinic
1
Request Form 8332 — Ask his ex-wife to sign the IRS declaration releasing the Child Tax Credit for both children for 2025.
2
File 2025 return with credits claimed — Estimated refund including ACTC and partial EITC: approximately $2,100 to $2,400.
3
Evaluate amending 2023 return — If ex-wife agrees, file Form 1040-X to recover an estimated $1,800 to $1,950 in previously unclaimed credits.
4
Document disability income correctly — Ensure workers’ comp exclusion is properly reflected on future returns to protect EITC eligibility.
Tommy was quiet for a moment when the preparer walked him through the numbers. “I kept thinking about my daughter’s birthday in January,” he told me later. “I had bought her a used bike I found on Facebook Marketplace because I couldn’t swing a new one. And I had this money sitting there I didn’t know about. That stings.”
The Complicated Reality of Guilt and Finances
Spending more time with Tommy, I noticed something that the numbers alone don’t capture. He is precise about his finances in a way that many people aren’t — he tracks his truck mileage for potential deductions, he keeps receipts, he knows his monthly expenses to within about twenty dollars. And yet the emotional weight of his divorce shapes every financial decision in ways that analytical precision can’t fully address.
He told me he had considered, more than once, asking his ex-wife to let him claim one of the children as a dependent. He had even looked it up online. But he felt asking would seem like he was trying to “get something” from the situation, and he didn’t want to open that conversation.
“I pay my child support every month, on time, no matter what. I’ve never missed it. So I guess I told myself I didn’t need to push for anything else. But that’s not really how taxes work, is it.”
— Tommy Reeves
It’s a dynamic I’ve encountered before in this kind of reporting — people who are meticulous about their obligations and instinctively reluctant to pursue benefits, as if claiming them feels like a concession or an admission of need. For Tommy, the child support payments had become a kind of identity: proof that he was a good father even at a distance. Asking for a tax form in return felt, to him, transactional in a way that sat uncomfortably.
The volunteer preparer, a retired accountant named Barbara who has worked the clinic for six years, told Tommy — and I paraphrased this for the article with her permission — that the Form 8332 arrangement exists precisely because Congress recognized that non-custodial parents who pay support deserve some recognition in the tax code. It is not “getting something” from a divorce. It is a legal structure designed for exactly his situation.
Tommy nodded slowly. “I wish someone had told me that three years ago,” he said.
Where Things Stand Now
When I followed up with Tommy by phone in late March 2026, he told me he had spoken with his ex-wife about Form 8332. The conversation went better than he expected — she agreed to sign the declaration for the 2025 tax year, allowing him to claim their younger child. They agreed she would continue claiming their daughter. It was not a perfect split of the potential credit, but it was a start.
His amended 2023 return is still under discussion. Tommy said he didn’t want to push the 8332 issue for a prior year at the same time he was rebuilding that cooperation, and I think that reflects the kind of careful, long-view thinking that defines how he operates. “I’d rather get it right going forward than get a check and mess up the relationship,” he told me.
The estimated refund on his 2025 return, once finalized, is around $1,850 — less than the theoretical maximum, but more than he has seen from a tax refund in years. He said he plans to put it toward a medical debt from his back injury that has been sitting in collections since November 2024.
Sitting across from Tommy in that church hall, watching him process two years of missed opportunities with the same measured composure he probably applies to a long overnight route, I found myself thinking about how many people file their taxes the same way every year simply because no one ever sat down and asked the right questions. The free clinic exists precisely for that gap. But not everyone finds their way to a folding chair on a Tuesday morning in East Tampa.
Tommy Reeves did. And two years late is still not too late.
Can a non-custodial parent claim the Child Tax Credit? ▸
Yes. A non-custodial parent can claim the Child Tax Credit if the custodial parent signs IRS Form 8332, which releases the dependency exemption. The Child Tax Credit is worth up to $2,000 per qualifying child for tax year 2025.
Are workers’ compensation payments taxable income? ▸
Generally no. According to IRS Publication 525, workers’ compensation received for job-related injuries or illness is not included in your taxable income. However, these payments can interact with other credits like the EITC in complex ways.
How long do you have to amend a tax return and claim a missed refund? ▸
The IRS allows taxpayers to file an amended return using Form 1040-X within three years from the original filing deadline to claim a refund. For a 2023 return filed in April 2024, the window generally closes in April 2027.
What is the maximum Earned Income Tax Credit for a single filer with two children in 2025? ▸
For tax year 2025, the maximum EITC for a single filer with two qualifying children is $6,604, according to IRS EITC tables. The credit phases out as income rises above certain thresholds.
Where can I find free tax preparation help similar to the clinic in this story? ▸
The IRS Volunteer Income Tax Assistance (VITA) program offers free tax preparation to people who generally earn $67,000 or less, have disabilities, or speak limited English. Site locations can be found using the VITA locator tool at irs.gov.
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