Most people assume the tax code is designed for people who understand it — accountants, financial planners, people with time to read IRS publications at night. Denise Peralta is proof that assumption costs ordinary Americans real money every single year.
I first encountered Denise on a Tuesday afternoon in late January 2026, at the Indianapolis Public Library branch on East 38th Street. I was there covering a free Medicare enrollment assistance event hosted by local volunteers. Denise wasn’t there for Medicare. She had wandered in hoping to use the computer terminals and spotted the table of helpers. She pulled up a chair and started asking questions — not about Medicare, but about everything else.
When the session wrapped up and the volunteers began packing their folders, Denise lingered. She had a notebook with handwritten questions she hadn’t gotten to. I introduced myself, and she looked at me for a moment before saying, “I just feel like I’m always one thing away from it all falling apart.”
That was the beginning of a two-hour conversation that I’ve been thinking about ever since.
The Numbers Behind the Anxiety
Denise Peralta is 42, a petroleum engineering technician who works for a mid-size energy consulting firm in the Indianapolis metro area. She earns approximately $38,400 a year — a salary that sounds stable until you hear the rest of the picture. She is raising a 10-year-old daughter named Camille entirely on her own. Her ex-husband was ordered by a Marion County court to pay $650 per month in child support. In the 14 months before we spoke, he had paid exactly zero dollars of it.
“I stopped looking at my bank account every morning because it just made me feel sick,” she told me, smoothing the cover of her notebook. “I knew roughly what was in there. I didn’t need the number to ruin my whole day.”
In October 2025, her 2011 Honda CR-V threw a timing belt and overheated on I-465. The repair estimate came back at $2,400. She didn’t have it. She’s been borrowing her neighbor’s car three mornings a week to get Camille to school and taking a bus the other days, adding 40 minutes to her commute each way.
“The car thing broke me a little,” she said. “Not the car itself. Just the feeling that there’s always something. There’s always another something.”
What She Assumed About Her Eligibility
For the last three tax filing seasons, Denise had used a free online filing tool and claimed the standard deduction. She listed Camille as a dependent. She got a modest refund — around $600 in 2024, around $480 in 2023. She assumed that was roughly what she was entitled to.
She had never claimed the Earned Income Tax Credit at its full value. She didn’t realize the Child Tax Credit had a refundable component — the Additional Child Tax Credit — that could put real money back in her pocket even if her tax liability was low. She also hadn’t heard of the Child and Dependent Care Credit, which could offset a portion of what she paid for Camille’s after-school program.
“I always figured I made too much for the EITC,” she explained. “I don’t know where I got that idea. I think someone told me once that it was for people who made less than me, and I just believed them and never checked.”
According to the IRS EITC eligibility guidelines, a single filer with one qualifying child can claim the credit with an adjusted gross income up to $46,560 for tax year 2025. At $38,400, Denise fell comfortably within range — and had for years.
The Turning Point at the Library Table
After I explained the basic structure of the EITC and the refundable portion of the Child Tax Credit, Denise went quiet for a moment. She looked down at her notebook, then back up.
I told her I wasn’t in a position to calculate her specific refund — that was a job for a tax professional or a certified VITA (Volunteer Income Tax Assistance) preparer. What I could tell her was that the credits existed, that her income level was likely within range, and that the IRS VITA locator tool could connect her with a free, IRS-certified tax preparer in Indianapolis who could look at her full picture at no cost.
She wrote down the URL. She underlined it twice.
What the VITA Appointment Revealed
I followed up with Denise by phone in mid-February 2026, about three weeks after our library conversation. She had gone to a VITA site operating out of a community center near Broad Ripple. The certified preparer spent nearly 90 minutes with her, going through her W-2, her documentation for Camille’s after-school care expenses, and her filing history.
The preliminary numbers were striking. Her 2025 return — accounting for the EITC, the refundable portion of the Child Tax Credit (the Additional Child Tax Credit), and a partial Child and Dependent Care Credit based on what she paid for Camille’s after-school program — pointed toward a total federal refund of approximately $5,780.
“She showed me the screen and I literally grabbed her arm,” Denise told me, laughing for the first time in our conversations. “I said, ‘Is that real? Is that number real?’ And she said yes. And I said, ‘I have to call my mom.'”
Her return was filed electronically on February 18, 2026. The IRS accepted it the same day. Per the standard processing timeline for electronic returns with direct deposit — typically 21 days according to IRS refund guidance — she expected the money in her account by mid-March.
It arrived on March 12. She confirmed this when I called to check in.
What She Did With the Money — and What She Didn’t
The car was first. She got the timing belt replaced and had the cooling system flushed for $2,390 at a shop that a coworker recommended. She paid cash.
She put $1,500 into a savings account she described as “Camille’s emergency fund — not mine, hers.” She paid off a $740 balance on a credit card that had been accruing interest since the car broke down. The remaining roughly $1,150 she kept liquid in her checking account.
“I didn’t go on vacation. I didn’t do anything Instagram-worthy,” she said. “I fixed the car, I paid the card, I saved some for Camille. That’s what the money was for.”
What she didn’t do was go back and amend prior years’ returns — something the VITA preparer mentioned was theoretically possible under certain conditions. Denise told me she just didn’t have the emotional bandwidth right now. “Maybe next tax season,” she said. “One thing at a time.”
The child support situation remained unresolved. The Marion County Prosecutor’s Office has an ongoing non-payment case against her ex, but enforcement moves slowly. She said she’s stopped expecting that money and started planning without it.
A Story That Repeats Itself More Than It Should
The IRS estimates that roughly 20 percent of eligible taxpayers don’t claim the EITC each year — leaving billions of dollars unclaimed nationally. The reasons vary: some don’t know they qualify, some find the rules confusing, some distrust government programs, some simply never had anyone sit down and explain it to them in plain language.
Denise Peralta is a petroleum engineering technician. She is not financially unsophisticated. She runs calculations at work. She manages a household budget alone. And she still spent three filing seasons leaving thousands of dollars on the table because of an assumption she’d never bothered to verify.
That’s not a failure of intelligence. That’s a failure of access — to information, to trusted guidance, to someone who will sit with you at a library table and say: let’s actually look at this together.
When I last spoke with Denise, she was in good spirits. Camille had started a recreational soccer league. The CR-V was running fine. The credit card balance was gone. She still avoids looking at her bank account first thing in the morning — old habits — but said the number, when she does look, no longer made her feel sick.
“I feel like I finally got something I was supposed to have,” she told me. “Not a handout. Something I earned and someone finally helped me find.”
I keep thinking about that notebook she had at the library — pages of handwritten questions she’d been carrying around, not knowing who to ask. The answers were out there. They just needed to find her.
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