The free tax preparation clinic at the Salvation Army branch on Broad Street in Richmond, Virginia, opens its doors every Saturday from late January through mid-April. On a cold Saturday morning in early February 2026, the waiting room was standing-room only. I was there to report on how low-to-moderate income filers were navigating this year’s changes to the Earned Income Tax Credit thresholds. Samantha O’Brien was sitting two chairs down from me, her twelve-year-old daughter Destiny asleep against her shoulder, a manila folder of W-2s and 1099s balanced on her knee.
She wasn’t hard to notice. While most people in the room looked anxious or defeated, Samantha had a particular kind of stillness about her — the stillness of someone who has rehearsed being calm in chaotic places. She works the overnight security shift at a commercial warehouse complex in Henrico County. She’s done it for six years. She told me later that the job trains you to look like nothing is wrong even when it is.
When the volunteer tax preparer called her name, I asked if she’d be willing to talk to me for a few minutes afterward. She said yes before I finished the sentence. “I always think maybe if somebody writes it down,” she said, “maybe somebody fixes it.”
A Budget That Only Works on Paper
Samantha O’Brien earns $23.40 an hour as a licensed security officer, working roughly 44 hours a week including overtime. That puts her gross annual income at approximately $53,500 — a figure that, on paper, places her above the poverty line and disqualifies her from most need-based assistance programs. In Richmond’s current rental market, where the median one-bedroom apartment now runs above $1,350 a month, that income leaves very little room.
She also runs a small online resale business — vintage clothing and home goods she sources from estate sales and thrift stores. At its peak in 2023, that side income added roughly $8,200 to her annual earnings. By the end of 2025, she told me, it had fallen to just under $2,900. “People stopped spending the way they were,” she said. “I’d list something for thirty dollars and it would sit there for two months. Same item sold in a day two years ago.”
She has one dependent, Destiny, and no co-parent contributing to the household. Her ex-husband left the state in 2019 and has had no contact since. Child support enforcement has produced nothing. Samantha manages everything — utilities, groceries, Destiny’s school fees, her own medical costs — alone.
She also has a partial disability. A back injury she sustained during a 2021 incident at work left her with a herniated disc at L4-L5. Workers’ compensation covered her initial treatment, but the ongoing physical therapy she needs — roughly $180 per session, two sessions a month — is only partially reimbursed by her employer’s health plan. After copays and deductibles, she estimates she pays out of pocket about $290 a month for disability-related medical expenses that the coverage doesn’t fully absorb.
The Garnishment She Didn’t See Coming
This is the part of Samantha’s story that stopped me cold when she told it. She had been expecting a federal refund of approximately $2,400, calculated by the volunteer preparer at the clinic. It reflected her withholding from the security job plus the Child Tax Credit for Destiny. She had plans for every dollar: $1,100 toward April rent, $480 to pay down a medical bill she’d been carrying since October, and the remaining $820 for a car repair she’d been delaying since November.
What she didn’t know — and what the tax preparer flagged when she ran Samantha’s file — was that a debt collection agency had filed a legal judgment against her in Henrico County General District Court in September 2025. The underlying debt was a credit card balance from 2018 that had been sold, resold, and eventually purchased by a third-party collector. The original amount was around $3,100. With interest and legal fees, the judgment now stood at $4,870.
The collector had obtained a writ of fieri facias — a legal tool in Virginia that allows a judgment creditor to seize funds from a bank account. The writ had been executed against her checking account in late January 2026. By the time her direct-deposit refund would have landed, the account it was headed to had already been levied. The timing was not accidental.
What the Tax Clinic Actually Did For Her
The volunteer preparer — a retired accountant named Gerald who has worked the clinic for eleven years — did not have legal authority to intervene in the garnishment. But he did something that mattered. He identified two deductions Samantha had not claimed in prior years: the business use of her personal vehicle for the resale operation, and a home office deduction tied to the square footage she used to photograph, store, and ship inventory.
Those deductions, when properly applied to her Schedule C, reduced her self-employment tax liability by $614 and increased her refund by $388. Gerald also flagged that she may have been eligible for the Virginia Earned Income Tax Credit in prior years and had not claimed it — something she could potentially address through amended state returns, though he recommended she consult a licensed tax professional before doing so.
The total refund, after corrections, came to $2,788. The problem, of course, was that a portion of it was still at risk depending on how the bank levy was structured and whether the collector had initiated an additional offset action. Gerald advised her to change her direct deposit account before the IRS processed the return — a step she took that afternoon by opening a new account at a credit union across town.
“Gerald didn’t have to spend that extra hour with me,” Samantha told me when we spoke again by phone in March. “He just did. He printed everything out and explained it twice. I’ve been doing my own taxes for fifteen years and I didn’t know half of what he showed me.”
The Small Win — and the Fear It Won’t Hold
By the time I spoke with Samantha again in late March 2026, her refund had been deposited into the new account — all $2,788 of it. The collector had not yet discovered the new account. She had paid April rent, cleared the October medical bill, and scheduled the car repair. For the first time in roughly eight months, she said, her checking account balance was not in the double digits.
But the judgment still exists. The $4,870 balance hasn’t gone away. The collector can still pursue wage garnishment through Virginia courts, and Samantha is aware that the relative quiet of the past few weeks may not last. She has spoken with a legal aid attorney at the Central Virginia Legal Aid Society who is reviewing her options — including whether the statute of limitations or any procedural errors in the original filing might provide grounds to challenge the judgment.
She’s also thinking about the years ahead. At 60, she’s five years from Medicare eligibility and two years from the earliest Social Security claiming age. Her estimated Social Security benefit, based on the statement she pulled from SSA’s My Social Security portal, shows a projected monthly benefit of $1,340 at age 62 — a figure she described as “not enough and also the most money I’ve ever seen in one place.” She knows that claiming early would permanently reduce her benefit, and she told me she’s trying not to make that decision from desperation.
What Samantha’s Story Reflects About This Tax Season
Samantha’s situation is not unusual in its basic architecture, even if the details are hers alone. According to the IRS, more than 33 million Americans used some form of free filing assistance in the 2025 filing season. Many of them, like Samantha, arrive at clinics with incomplete information about how debt collection intersects with tax refunds — a gap that can cost people hundreds or thousands of dollars.
The interaction between private debt judgments and tax refunds is particularly confusing because the rules differ depending on whether the debt is government-owed or private. Federal tax refunds are subject to the Treasury Offset Program for debts like unpaid federal student loans, back child support, and state income tax debts. Private creditors, by contrast, must go through state courts — but they can be just as effective once they obtain a judgment and execute a bank levy.
What struck me most, sitting in that waiting room on Broad Street and then again on the phone weeks later, was how close Samantha came to losing that refund entirely — not through fraud, not through negligence, but through a gap in information that nobody had ever filled for her. The debt was real. The judgment was valid. But the levy, executed against an account she could legally close and replace, was not inevitable.
When I last checked in with Samantha, she was researching whether her resale business might qualify for any small business support programs through the city of Richmond. She had also signed up for a financial coaching session through a local nonprofit. The judgment against her hasn’t moved. The business revenue is still down. The back pain hasn’t gone away. But the refund landed, and the rent is paid, and for now, that’s enough to keep going.
She asked me, at the end of our last call, whether I thought things would get easier. I told her I didn’t know. She said that was probably the most honest answer she’d heard in a while.
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