Roughly one in five Americans who qualify for the Earned Income Tax Credit never claims it — leaving an estimated $7 billion in federal relief uncollected each year, according to the IRS EITC Central. I thought about that number for weeks after I met Hector Dawkins at a CVS in Knoxville, Tennessee on a Tuesday afternoon in early February 2026.
I was waiting for a prescription when I heard a man at the counter asking, with quiet frustration, whether the pharmacist knew anything about programs that help cover the cost of blood pressure medication. The pharmacist looked sympathetic but uncertain. The man — broad-shouldered, wearing scrubs under a quilted vest — thanked her and turned away. Something about the way he said “I’ve just been paying full price for three years” stopped me.
I introduced myself. He told me his name was Hector Dawkins. We ended up talking for forty-five minutes in the parking lot.
A Life Built on the Edge of the Margin
Hector Dawkins is 47 years old and has worked as a dental assistant at a private practice in West Knoxville for the past nine years. He earns approximately $31,200 annually — slightly above Tennessee’s median for his occupation, he told me, but not by much. He is single and has no children of his own.
What Hector does have is his 22-year-old brother, Marcus, who enrolled at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga in fall 2023. Hector has been covering Marcus’s rent — about $610 a month — and contributing to groceries and textbooks since their mother passed away from a stroke in October 2022.
“My mom made me promise,” Hector told me. “Marcus was the first person in our family to actually get into a university. I was not going to let that fall apart.”
Supporting a sibling through college while earning just over $31,000 a year leaves almost nothing. Hector has zero retirement savings — he told me he let his employer’s 401(k) enrollment window pass twice, once in 2019 and again in 2021, because he needed every dollar liquid. His credit score sits at 581 after a medical debt of roughly $4,400 went to collections in 2020 following an emergency appendectomy.
He described his financial position with a kind of controlled anger that I recognized immediately — not at any one person, but at the sheer weight of a system he felt was impossible to navigate without insider knowledge. “Every time I think I figure something out,” he said, “there’s another form, another deadline, another thing I was supposed to know about that nobody told me.”
Three Years of Leaving Money Behind
When I asked Hector how he filed his taxes, he said he used a free online filing tool and did it himself each spring. He had filed this way for at least six years. And for at least three of those years — 2022, 2023, and 2024 — he had almost certainly left significant money on the table.
Hector had heard of the Earned Income Tax Credit, but he assumed it was only for people with children. That is one of the most persistent misconceptions about the program. The IRS eligibility guidelines make clear that single filers between ages 25 and 65 with earned income below the threshold — roughly $18,591 for no dependents in 2025 — can claim the credit. Given Hector’s income level in prior years when Marcus was not yet in college, his 2022 return may have qualified.
Beyond the EITC, Hector had never heard of the Saver’s Credit — a federal credit worth up to $1,000 for single filers who contribute even small amounts to a qualified retirement account. Because he had opted out of his employer’s 401(k), he had never accessed it. And the Credit for Other Dependents, which can apply when a taxpayer supports a qualifying relative such as a sibling, had never come up in his self-filing process.
The Turning Point: A Free Filing Service He Had Never Used
After our conversation in that parking lot, Hector agreed to let me follow up with him over the following six weeks. He had a tax appointment scheduled for late February 2026 at a local IRS VITA site — Volunteer Income Tax Assistance — which offers free tax preparation to people who earn roughly $67,000 or less. He had only found out about it from a flyer at his dentist’s office breakroom posted by a coworker. He had never used it before.
When I spoke with Hector again on March 4th, 2026, his voice had shifted. Not jubilant — that is not who he is — but something had loosened in it.
The VITA preparer determined that for tax year 2025, Hector qualified for a $587 Earned Income Tax Credit as a childless single filer. The Credit for Other Dependents for Marcus — who lives with Hector part-time and for whom Hector provides more than half of financial support — added another $500. His total refund for 2025 came to $1,843, compared to the $390 he had received the prior year when he filed alone.
The VITA volunteer also flagged that Hector’s 2023 return, filed by himself, had likely missed the EITC. Amended returns — Form 1040-X — can be filed up to three years after the original due date, meaning the 2023 return was still within reach. Hector told me he was weighing whether to pursue that.
The Prescription Problem He Came In With
The blood pressure medication that had brought Hector to the pharmacy in the first place — lisinopril, which he has taken since 2021 — cost him approximately $47 a month out of pocket. He does not have dental benefits through his employer that cover his own medical costs in any meaningful way, and he carries only a basic marketplace plan with a high deductible.
The VITA volunteer flagged the Extra Help program, also known as the Low Income Subsidy, administered by the Social Security Administration. For individuals earning below roughly 150% of the federal poverty level — approximately $21,870 for a single person in 2026 — the program can dramatically reduce prescription drug costs under Medicare Part D. Hector is not yet Medicare-eligible, but the referral pointed him toward a parallel state pharmaceutical assistance program available through Tennessee.
“I spent three years paying full price for something I probably didn’t have to,” he told me, and the flatness in his voice carried more weight than anger would have. “That’s money I could have put toward Marcus’s books. That’s money that’s just gone.”
What Hector’s Story Reflects About a Broader Gap
Hector Dawkins is not an outlier. His experience — working steadily, filing taxes on his own, and missing credits because no one explained they existed — tracks with what advocates for low-income taxpayers have described for years. The EITC alone goes unclaimed by an estimated 20% of eligible filers, according to IRS data, with underutilization concentrated among single adults without children and first-generation filers without tax preparation support.
The problem, as Hector sees it, is structural. “There’s no shortage of programs,” he said when we spoke for the last time on March 18th, 2026. “There’s a shortage of people who know about them and can explain them in plain language to someone who works forty hours a week and doesn’t have time to read government websites.”
His $1,843 refund will go toward catching up on a credit card balance that has been accruing interest at 24.9% APR since 2023. It will not fix his credit score, fund a retirement account, or replace the roughly $6,300 in EITC he estimates he missed over the previous three filing years. But it is something. And for Hector Dawkins, something — after years of feeling like the system was designed for everyone but him — carries its own particular weight.
I drove back to my office thinking about all the people who never overhear the right conversation, never see the flyer in the breakroom, never end up talking to the right person in a pharmacy parking lot. Hector got a version of a second chance. The question his story leaves open — and I have not stopped sitting with it — is how many people are still waiting for theirs.
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