Every year, roughly one in five eligible workers fails to claim the Earned Income Tax Credit — leaving an estimated $7 billion unclaimed, according to the IRS. For many of those workers, the reason isn’t carelessness — it’s that nobody ever told them they qualified.
Nadine Rollins is one of those workers. I first heard her name in February 2026, when a pastor at a small Baptist church in Jacksonville’s Northside neighborhood mentioned her during a conversation about families quietly struggling under financial pressure. He asked if I’d be willing to talk with her. Carefully, he said — because she was intensely private. She had never discussed her finances with friends, and the idea of being seen as someone who needed help made her deeply uncomfortable.
She agreed to meet me at a diner near her home on a Tuesday morning, arriving five minutes early in her work jacket with a thermos of coffee. She was 39, married, the mother of a 17-year-old named Marcus who was heading to college in the fall. She had been a licensed plumber for 14 years. She looked exactly like someone who fixed things for a living — steady, direct, and self-sufficient. She did not look like someone carrying $66,200 in combined medical debt and student loans while her workers’ compensation appeal sat in a state queue. But she was.
A Story She Had Never Told Anyone
The pastor had known the Rollins family for several years. He told me Nadine had quietly stopped contributing to the church’s giving fund in October 2024 — something he never commented on publicly, but noticed. When her husband mentioned that Nadine had been injured on the job and the workers’ comp claim had been denied, the pastor began to understand the scope of what they were navigating alone.
When I sat down with Nadine Rollins that morning, she spent the first ten minutes making clear she wasn’t looking for sympathy. She’d grown up watching her mother work double shifts without complaint and had inherited a version of resilience that looked, from the outside, a lot like silence.
She hadn’t failed at anything. What unraveled her finances wasn’t poor decisions — it was a sequence of overlapping crises that arrived within six weeks of each other in the fall of 2024, each one survivable alone, but collectively overwhelming.
Three Hits That Arrived Almost at Once
On September 12, 2024, Nadine was working a commercial job site in downtown Jacksonville when she fell from a ladder and injured her lower back and left knee. She was removed from the job and referred for imaging and physical therapy. The workers’ compensation claim, filed through her employer’s insurer, was denied on November 3, 2024. The stated reason: the insurer disputed whether the fall had occurred within the scope of her assigned duties, claiming she was on a personal break at the time of the incident.
“They said I was on a break,” she told me, her voice flat. “I wasn’t on a break. But try proving that when the foreman who saw it happen suddenly can’t remember.” She was left with $14,200 in medical bills and no income for nearly two months during her recovery.
The second burden was student loan debt. Nadine had earned a graduate degree in construction management from the University of North Florida in 2016, accumulating $52,000 in federal loans. Her standard repayment plan ran $387 a month. With no paycheck coming in after the injury, that payment became impossible to make without depleting their small savings account.
The third pressure was childcare. Marcus was 17 and needed after-school supervision and college-prep enrichment programs to stay competitive in his applications — programs that cost the family $420 a month. That expense had been manageable before the injury. After it, each month required a new round of mental arithmetic just to figure out which bill to delay.
Their combined household income in 2024 landed at approximately $41,000. Her husband worked part-time as a security guard while managing a chronic health condition. By any federal measure, they were a low-income household — they just didn’t know what that meant in terms of what they might be eligible for.
The VITA Appointment That Changed Her Refund
The pastor had done more than make an introduction to me — months earlier, he had quietly connected Nadine to a Volunteer Income Tax Assistance program affiliated with a local nonprofit. VITA sites offer free, IRS-certified tax preparation to households earning roughly $67,000 or less annually, according to the IRS VITA program. Nadine had been filing her own taxes for years using a paid commercial software service. She had never heard of VITA.
At her appointment in late January 2025, a certified volunteer preparer worked through her full 2024 tax picture. What emerged was a number she had to ask them to repeat. She qualified for the Earned Income Tax Credit — a fully refundable federal credit designed specifically for working households with low to moderate income. With one qualifying child and her household’s adjusted gross income, her EITC benefit for tax year 2024 came to approximately $3,584. She also qualified for the Child Tax Credit, adding another $2,000.
“When they told me that number, I asked them to say it again,” she told me, and it was the first time she laughed during our conversation. “I went in there thinking I owed money. I always went in thinking I owed money.”
As Nadine explained, the commercial software she’d used in previous years had asked questions she hadn’t always answered completely — particularly around childcare expenditures and how to account for earned income in years when her hours fluctuated due to seasonal construction work. The VITA preparer caught those gaps and ensured her full eligibility was documented accurately.
Where Things Stand Now — and What Is Still Unresolved
When I spoke with Nadine in February 2026, the $5,800 refund she received in spring 2025 had already been largely absorbed by the crisis that prompted it. About $3,100 went directly to the most urgent medical bills. Another $1,400 went toward catching up the student loan payments that had fallen behind during her recovery months. The remainder went into a savings account she described as “barely breathing.”
The workers’ compensation appeal was still pending. Her attorney had estimated the process could take anywhere from six to eighteen additional months. “I try not to think about it every day,” she told me. “If I sit with it too long, I’ll go somewhere dark. So I just keep working.”
Marcus had been accepted to Florida State College at Jacksonville for the fall 2026 semester — a commuter school, which would keep housing costs off the table. Nadine was cautiously tracking the American Opportunity Tax Credit as a possibility for future filing years but was careful, she said, not to count money she hadn’t confirmed.
An income-driven repayment counselor had estimated her monthly student loan payment could drop to approximately $110 based on her household income — freeing up roughly $277 per month. As of our meeting, she had not yet finalized that enrollment, held back by the paperwork load and what she called “mental bandwidth.” There were only so many forms a person could manage at once while also working full days and raising a kid.
What stayed with me after I left that diner was how precisely Nadine Rollins calibrated her relief. Not gratitude in the sweeping sense — more like a careful acknowledgment that a system had done a small portion of what it was designed to do, and that she had needed it to. “I’ve been paying into this stuff for 14 years,” she said near the end of our conversation. “It’s not charity. It’s mine. I just didn’t know how to get to it.”
She still hasn’t told her friends about any of it. That part, she said, wasn’t changing. But she was planning to ask the pastor whether there was a discreet way to point other families in the congregation toward the VITA program — without anyone knowing the suggestion had come from her.
That felt like exactly the kind of person Nadine Rollins was: private to a fault, genuinely competent, and more generous than her situation had any obligation to make her.
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