Roughly 20 percent of Americans who qualify for the Earned Income Tax Credit never claim it — leaving an estimated $7 billion in refunds uncollected every single year, according to the IRS. I thought about that figure when I pulled into the parking lot of a community church in Little Rock, Arkansas, on a Tuesday evening in late February 2026, where a Volunteer Income Tax Assistance clinic was wrapping up its third week of the season.
That’s where I first met Ivan Womack. He was sitting near the back of a folding-chair waiting area, filling out an intake form with the focused, slightly suspicious expression of someone who had been burned before. He was 26 years old, a licensed plumber running his own small business, and he had driven forty minutes across town after his wife told him they had nothing to lose by coming.
A Business That Was Supposed to Be His Way Out
When I sat down with Ivan Womack after his appointment with the clinic volunteers, he described launching his plumbing operation — Womack Pipe & Drain — in early 2021 with a used work van, $3,200 in tools, and a handful of referrals from a former employer. For the first two years, things moved in the right direction. His gross revenue hit $52,000 in 2022. He and his wife, Deja, had their third child that same year.
Then the slide began. Larger plumbing contractors started underbidding him on jobs in the southwest Little Rock neighborhoods where he’d built his client base. Fuel costs cut into every service call. By 2024, his gross revenue had dropped to $41,000. In 2025, the year he was now filing taxes for, it fell again — to approximately $34,200.
“I went from feeling like I was building something real to just treading water,” Ivan told me, his voice even but his jaw tight. “Every time I thought I caught a break, something else hit.”
The something else arrived in September 2024. His youngest son, then 22 months old, was rushed to Arkansas Children’s Hospital with a severe respiratory infection. The child spent four days admitted. The family’s insurance covered a portion, but Ivan was left with $11,700 in medical bills. He negotiated a payment plan on $3,300 of that directly with the hospital. The remaining $8,400 went onto two credit cards — the only financial lifeline he had available that week.
Why Ivan Assumed He Owed Money
Self-employed filers face a different psychological relationship with tax season than W-2 workers. No employer withholds taxes on their behalf throughout the year, which means the bill — or the refund — arrives all at once. For Ivan, two consecutive years of paying self-employment tax quarterly had left him conditioned to expect the IRS to want more from him, not less.
His reluctance was understandable given his history. In 2023, after filing his 2022 taxes without professional help, he made an error on his Schedule C — he hadn’t correctly deducted his vehicle mileage — and received a notice from the IRS requesting an additional $740. He paid it, but the experience left a mark. “After that, tax season just meant stress,” he said.
What Ivan didn’t realize was that his 2025 situation looked very different on paper. His net self-employment income, after allowable business deductions, was substantially lower than his gross revenue. And with three qualifying children under age 13, his household profile placed him squarely in the target population for two of the most significant refundable tax credits available to working families.
What the Clinic Volunteers Found
Ivan’s appointment with the VITA-certified volunteers lasted about 75 minutes. When I spoke with him afterward, he was still processing what they had shown him. The volunteers had walked him through his Schedule C line by line, identifying deductions he hadn’t taken in prior years — including business phone use, a portion of his tool purchases, and mileage he’d driven for work but never logged formally.
After accounting for those deductions, his net self-employment income came in at roughly $21,800. That figure, combined with Deja’s status as a non-working spouse and the presence of three dependent children, made Ivan eligible for a substantial Earned Income Tax Credit. The volunteers also identified eligibility for the refundable portion of the Child Tax Credit — formally called the Additional Child Tax Credit — across all three of his children.
The total federal refund the volunteers calculated for Ivan’s 2025 return came to approximately $7,820. Combined with a smaller Arkansas state refund of around $310, Ivan was looking at over $8,100 in total — more than enough to pay off the credit card debt that had been compounding interest at 24.99 percent since the previous fall.
The Moment It Became Real
Ivan told me he asked the volunteer to print the numbers twice. He sat in his car in the church parking lot for a few minutes before calling his wife. “She started crying,” he said, pausing. “I almost did too, to be honest. We’ve been in survival mode for so long that good news feels fake at first.”
The IRS issued his refund via direct deposit 19 days after he e-filed, which is within the agency’s standard processing window for returns claiming EITC. Per IRS guidance, refunds on returns claiming EITC or ACTC are generally issued after mid-February due to additional fraud screening requirements under the PATH Act — but Ivan had filed in late February, so the timing worked in his favor.
He used $8,400 of the combined refund to pay off both credit cards in full. “That was the first thing,” he said without hesitation. “I wasn’t putting that money anywhere else until those cards were at zero. I’ve been paying interest on that debt for six months.”
What Ivan Is Still Carrying
The refund solved one problem. It didn’t solve all of them. When I asked Ivan about his business outlook for 2026, the bitterness he’d carried into that waiting room came back into his voice — not sharp, but present, like a bruise that hasn’t healed.
His business revenue has declined for three consecutive years. The remaining $1,700 from the refund, after paying off the cards, was going toward van maintenance he’d been deferring. His wife, Deja, had been looking into returning to part-time work once their youngest turned two — a step they’d hoped to delay, but one that financial reality was accelerating.
The volunteers had also flagged that Ivan likely under-claimed deductions in 2023 as well. Filing an amended return — a Form 1040-X — was something they encouraged him to look into, though that process can take several months. Ivan said he planned to bring his 2023 documents back to the clinic the following week to find out if an amendment was worth pursuing. A potential additional refund of several hundred dollars would not change his trajectory, but he was no longer willing to leave money behind without at least asking the question.
As I drove home that evening, I kept thinking about the intake form Ivan had been filling out when I arrived — careful and guarded, the posture of someone who expected another loss. The tax system had, in this case, worked for him in a way he hadn’t known to expect. Whether that becomes a foundation or just a one-year lifeline depends on forces well outside any refund check.
Related: She Owed $47,000 in Student Loans and Faced a 30% Rent Hike. Then a Tax Clinic Changed Her Math.
Related: My 2026 Tax Refund Showed ‘Processing’ for 31 Days — Here Is What the IRS Actually Told Me
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