The folding chairs were almost full by the time Tommy Dupree made his way to the back of the Spokane Public Library’s community room on a Tuesday afternoon in late January 2026. He wasn’t there for himself, exactly — he’d come with questions about his mother’s Medicare options. But somewhere between the enrollment pamphlets and the coffee station, he found me, and he started talking about money in the way people do when they’ve been holding it in too long.
I was there covering the Medicare open enrollment event for American Relief, interviewing attendees about their benefits experiences. Tommy approached me after the session ended, still holding an untouched cup of coffee, and asked if I knew anything about tax credits for families like his. I told him I’d be glad to sit down and hear his situation. We ended up talking for nearly two hours.
The Life Behind the Numbers
Tommy Dupree has worked as a custodian for the Spokane Public Schools district for eighteen years. He’s 40 now, remarried since 2019, and living in a four-bedroom house in the Shadle Park neighborhood with his wife, Renata, and a blended household of four children — two from his first marriage, ages 14 and 11, and two from Renata’s, ages 9 and 7. By most measures, he’s a working-class success story. But the financial picture he described was considerably more complicated.
His base salary runs approximately $38,400 per year. Renata works part-time as a dental hygienist’s assistant, pulling in roughly $16,000 annually — but her hours fluctuate by season, and there are stretches of six to eight weeks, usually over summer break, when she’s barely working at all. That irregular rhythm makes budgeting feel like guesswork, Tommy told me.
The mortgage situation added another layer of stress. Tommy and his first wife had bought a modest home in 2017 for $212,000. After the divorce, he kept the house and refinanced in 2021 — right at the peak of the Spokane market — rolling in some debt to cover the settlement. He now carries a $294,000 mortgage on a home currently appraised at around $271,000. He knows the math. It keeps him up at night.
Three Years of Filing Incorrectly
When Tommy started doing his own taxes around 2022, he made a mistake that’s more common than most people realize. Because his custody arrangement with his ex-wife alternates claiming rights on their two older children, Tommy assumed he could only ever claim two dependents — his own two kids in his off years, or Renata’s two kids when she asked him to. He never claimed all four in the same return, even in years when he was legally entitled to do so under IRS tiebreaker rules.
The result was a significantly smaller Earned Income Tax Credit than he qualified for — and a Child Tax Credit that was capped at two children when it should have reflected three or four. According to the IRS EITC eligibility tables, a married couple filing jointly with four qualifying children and an adjusted gross income of approximately $54,400 can receive a maximum EITC of around $7,430 for tax year 2025. Tommy had been claiming closer to $3,100.
The Child Tax Credit compounded the loss. Per IRS guidelines, eligible families can receive up to $2,000 per qualifying child under 17, with up to $1,700 refundable per child in 2025. Tommy had been claiming $4,000 in potential credits when he should have been claiming significantly more in years when all four children qualified.
When I laid out a rough estimate of what he may have left unclaimed over three filing years — approximately $5,200 in total between the EITC shortfall and the Child Tax Credit gap — Tommy went quiet for a moment.
The Amended Return Question
The IRS allows taxpayers to amend returns within three years of the original filing date using Form 1040-X. That window is critical — and for Tommy, it was still open on his 2022 and 2023 filings as of early 2026, though the clock was running. His 2022 return, filed in April 2023, would need to be amended before April 2026 to preserve any refund claim.
Tommy was skeptical when I explained the amendment process. His experience with the tax preparer who had overcharged and filed incorrectly back in 2021 had left a deep distrust of anyone touching his financial paperwork. He said he’d looked into free filing services before but assumed they were “too basic” for a blended family situation.
What he hadn’t known — and what I pointed him toward — was the IRS Free File program and the network of IRS-certified Volunteer Income Tax Assistance (VITA) sites. According to the IRS VITA program page, certified volunteers are specifically trained in credits like the EITC, Child Tax Credit, and dependent eligibility rules — exactly the areas where Tommy had been filing incorrectly.
What the VITA Appointment Revealed
I followed up with Tommy by phone in early March 2026, about six weeks after our conversation at the library. He’d gone to the VITA site at Spokane’s Northeast Community Center, nervously, with a folder of documents he described as “a mess.” The certified volunteer who worked with him spent nearly three hours going through his filing history.
The diagnosis was almost exactly what we’d estimated. His 2022 amended return was expected to yield approximately $1,840 in additional refund. His 2023 return, where the dependency situation had been clearest, was looking at a correction of around $2,150. His 2025 filing — his first correctly prepared return — projected a refund of $3,600, compared to the $900 he’d received the year prior.
The 2024 return was a different story. It had been filed in April 2025, just under a year before our conversation, and the VITA volunteer confirmed it also contained errors — but the amendment would only recover money, not owe it, so the timeline pressure was less acute. That correction was expected to add roughly $1,100 to the pile once processed.
The Mortgage Shadow and What Remains Unresolved
Tommy’s immediate tax situation had shifted meaningfully. But he was candid with me about what the recovered refunds couldn’t fix. The mortgage was still underwater. His retirement savings — a state pension through the Washington State Department of Retirement Systems and a small 403(b) account — totaled roughly $41,000 at 40 years old, a number he said “keeps him awake more than anything.”
He’s skeptical of financial products and advisors the way some people are skeptical of used car salespeople. That experience with the bank that sold his mortgage without proper notice back in 2018 — something that is legal but that Tommy felt was a betrayal — calcified something in him. He prefers to understand every piece of paper before he signs it, even if that means doing things imperfectly on his own.
The roughly $8,690 in recovered and projected refunds won’t erase a $23,000 equity gap on his home. It won’t fund a retirement that most financial benchmarks suggest should be considerably larger by now. Tommy knows that, and he said so plainly. But it was money he had earned, money the tax code had set aside for families exactly like his, and for three years he had walked past it without knowing it was there.
When I asked what he planned to do with the amended refunds when they arrived, he said Renata wanted to put half toward the mortgage principal and split the rest between an emergency fund and the kids’ school expenses. “We’ve never had a real emergency fund,” he told me. “That’s probably the thing I’m most embarrassed about.” He didn’t sound embarrassed when he said it. He sounded tired, and a little relieved.
What Tommy’s Story Reflects More Broadly
Tommy Dupree’s situation isn’t unusual. The IRS estimates that roughly 20 percent of eligible taxpayers fail to claim the Earned Income Tax Credit each year, leaving billions of dollars unclaimed nationally. Blended families, irregular income, and custody-sharing arrangements create dependency questions that many self-filers get wrong — often without ever knowing it.
The VITA program served approximately 3.2 million taxpayers in 2024, according to IRS data, but advocates say millions more who qualify for free in-person assistance never use it. The people who need it most — working families with complicated household situations and incomes too modest to absorb professional tax preparation costs — are often the least likely to know it exists.
- VITA sites are available at libraries, community centers, and nonprofit locations across most metro areas
- Service is free for households earning approximately $67,000 or less annually
- Volunteers are IRS-certified and trained specifically in credits for low-to-moderate income filers
- The IRS VITA locator tool at IRS.gov allows zip code searches for nearby sites
Tommy told me he planned to go back to the same VITA volunteer next January to get ahead of his 2025 filing season. “She didn’t make me feel stupid,” he said, which I suspect matters more to him than almost anything else.
I left that follow-up phone call thinking about the gap between what people are entitled to and what they actually receive — not because the system is hiding it, but because life is complicated and forms are confusing and trust is hard to rebuild once it’s been broken. Tommy Dupree has been rebuilding his, one document at a time. That’s not a small thing.
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