What would you do if a government agency owed you money, and the only reason you hadn’t collected it was that no one told you to ask? For millions of Americans, that question isn’t hypothetical — it’s paperwork buried somewhere between a confusing tax form and a letter they never opened.
I first heard about Andre Novak from a social worker named Patricia Fuentes at the El Paso County Assistance Office on Montana Avenue. I had been reporting on low-income workers navigating federal relief programs, and Fuentes flagged Andre as someone whose situation illustrated a gap she kept seeing: people who technically filed their taxes, technically followed the rules, and still left money on the table they didn’t know existed. She asked if she could pass along my number. He called me three days later, on a Thursday afternoon in February 2026, clearly skeptical about the whole thing.
“I don’t really talk to press,” Andre Novak told me when we finally sat down at a diner on Mesa Street. “But she said it might help somebody else not go through what I went through.”
A Working Man With a Disappearing Safety Net
Andre Novak is 38 years old, a union electrician who has worked El Paso job sites for the better part of a decade. He lives with a roommate in a two-bedroom apartment in the Northeast part of the city, splitting rent to keep costs manageable. He is single, has no dependents, and by most visible measures looks like someone who has it together — steady trade work, union card in his wallet, a graduate degree from a Texas state university he earned in his late twenties.
The degree is part of what makes his financial picture more complicated than it appears. Andre took out approximately $41,000 in federal student loans to complete a master’s program in construction management, believing it would move him into project management roles. When the expected promotions didn’t materialize, he returned to journeyman electrical work — good work, but work that didn’t justify the debt load he’d taken on. By 2021, he was carrying that balance while also managing a damaged credit score from a period in 2019 when several medical bills went to collections before he realized he needed to handle them.
Andre’s income in 2021 came to roughly $26,400 — a lighter year because a major commercial project he’d been assigned to ran into permitting delays and he lost three months of full-time hours. He filed his 2021 federal return in early April 2022 using tax software he’d bought at a pharmacy. He received a modest refund of $214 and moved on.
What he didn’t know — what the software hadn’t clearly flagged — was that he had entered $0 in the field for the Recovery Rebate Credit, indicating he’d already received his third Economic Impact Payment of $1,400. He hadn’t. The payment had been sent to a bank account he’d closed in 2020 after a dispute with the institution, and it had been returned to the IRS. He never received a follow-up notice he could understand, and he didn’t know to look for one.
What the Recovery Rebate Credit Actually Was
The Recovery Rebate Credit was the mechanism Congress built into the 2021 tax filing process to make sure anyone who missed their third stimulus payment — officially called the third Economic Impact Payment — could still claim it. The payment was $1,400 per eligible individual. According to the IRS, taxpayers who filed a 2021 return but left the credit field blank or entered $0 when they were actually eligible had been identified through an internal review completed in late 2024.
Starting in December 2024 and continuing through January 2025, the IRS began issuing automatic payments — no amended return required — to those roughly 1 million filers. The payments went to the bank account or address listed on the taxpayer’s most recent return, and the maximum a single filer could receive was $1,400.
Andre’s name was on that list. He just didn’t know it yet.
The Waiting — and the Distrust That Made It Worse
When I asked Andre why he hadn’t followed up with the IRS in 2022 or 2023, his answer was immediate and direct.
That distrust had real consequences. When a letter did eventually arrive from the IRS in mid-2023 — he believes it was about an address discrepancy — he set it aside, convinced it was either a scam or something that would cost him money to resolve. He told me he threw it away after two weeks without opening it.
Meanwhile, his student loan balance had grown. His loans had been in administrative forbearance through much of 2020 and 2021 under pandemic-era relief measures, but once repayment resumed, he was looking at a monthly payment of approximately $390 under a standard repayment plan. He couldn’t consistently afford it on top of his other expenses, and by early 2023 he had missed three consecutive payments — enough to trigger credit reporting damage that further lowered a score already struggling from the 2019 collections accounts.
The Turning Point — a Referral He Almost Ignored
Andre ended up at the El Paso County Assistance Office in November 2025 looking into utility assistance programs — specifically the Low Income Home Energy Assistance Program (LIHEAP), which helps qualifying households with energy costs. It was there that Patricia Fuentes, the social worker I mentioned earlier, started asking him broader questions about his financial situation.
She was the one who told him about the IRS automatic payments for the Recovery Rebate Credit. She was also the one who asked him if he’d checked the IRS’s Where’s My Refund tool recently — and when he said he hadn’t, she sat with him while he pulled it up on his phone.
The tool showed a payment had been issued in January 2025 — $1,400, sent to the address on his most recent tax return. Andre told me he genuinely didn’t believe it at first. “I thought the website was broken,” he said.
The check had been mailed to an address he’d updated on his 2023 return — and his roommate, who had been collecting the mail, had put an envelope from the IRS on the kitchen counter without saying anything. Andre found it that same evening, unopened, wedged under a pizza box.
The Outcome — Real Money, Complicated Math
The $1,400 check was real. Andre deposited it in February 2026, approximately nine months after it had been sitting on his kitchen counter and three years after the credit it represented first became available to him.
Andre used $800 of the $1,400 to make a partial catch-up payment on his student loans, bringing his account out of delinquent status. The remaining $600 went toward a car repair he’d been putting off for months — a power window motor on his truck that made driving in El Paso summers miserable. He told me he felt both relieved and frustrated.
The frustration came from a clearer picture of what else he’d missed. Patricia Fuentes helped him look at several prior tax years and identified that in 2020, when his income dropped significantly, he may have also qualified for the Earned Income Tax Credit for workers without qualifying children — a credit that can provide up to several hundred dollars for lower-income single filers. The window for amending his 2020 return had closed in April 2024.
As of our conversation in February 2026, Andre’s student loans remain in repayment, though Fuentes helped him submit paperwork for an Income-Driven Repayment plan that could lower his monthly obligation. His credit score, last checked in January 2026, sat at 601 — low, but no longer actively declining. He has no retirement savings and has not started any. He knows it.
What Andre’s Story Actually Shows
Sitting across from Andre Novak at that diner on Mesa Street, I kept thinking about the specific chain of events that had to happen for him to collect money that had been legally his since 2021. A social worker had to ask the right questions. He had to be willing to show up somewhere and talk to a stranger. His roommate had to not throw away the mail. All of those things had to go right — and for years, they hadn’t.
The IRS process that eventually delivered his $1,400 was, by most measures, a success story for government outreach. The agency identified eligible taxpayers, issued payments without requiring amended returns, and sent notifications. What the process couldn’t account for was someone like Andre, who had spent years training himself to look away from anything involving the IRS or a financial institution because his prior experiences had taught him that engagement meant loss.
That’s not a policy failure anyone can easily legislate around. It’s the kind of gap that gets filled — when it gets filled at all — by social workers sitting with someone at a county office and asking the right questions at the right moment.
Andre told me, as we were getting up to leave, that he’d already started opening his mail more consistently. It’s a small thing. For him, it was not a small thing.
It is something. Not enough, but something. And for a lot of people navigating the same systems with the same scars, that might be exactly where it starts.
Vivienne Marlowe Reyes is a Senior Tax & Stimulus Writer at American Relief covering federal economic relief programs and the people navigating them.
Related: She Owed $47,000 in Student Loans and Faced a 30% Rent Hike. Then a Tax Clinic Changed Her Math.
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