After a four-year battle with the IRS, Wilson Perry Kirby, a Middle Tennessee farmer, finally got an acknowledgement that the government had indeed made a mistake. In 2022, Kirby received a $20,000 tax refund he knew wasn't meant for him. Instead of cashing it, he immediately tried to return the money. But instead, the IRS responded by charging him $4,000 in interest and withholding his own $1,800 refund, according to a report by WTVF. When the incident got media coverage, country music star John Rich saw the report and tried to untangle what four years of official channels couldn't fix. This month, Kirby finally received his refund, along with two apology letters from the agencies involved.
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The government’s mistake came at his expense
All of Kirby’s trouble started in 2022, when the IRS sent him a $20,000 tax refund. Wilson Perry Kirby, a retired Montgomery County Highway Department worker and farmer from Coopertown, Tennessee, knew the money didn’t belong to him. So he contacted his accountant and filed the paperwork. They waited for the agency to acknowledge the error and process the return. That's where everything stalled.
Instead of acknowledging the mistake and accepting the money back, the IRS charged him $4,000 in interest for holding on to it. Kirby was speechless: he hadn’t spent a penny, and in fact, all he did was try to return it. But the agency treated him like a debtor. To make it worse, the IRS withheld his own $1,800 tax refund to put towards the interest he supposedly owed.
At this point, the Tennessee farmer was helpless. He reached out to anyone who might help, including government officials, his state senator's office, county representatives, the mayor, the governor and even the president's office. But none of his appeals were answered. A farmer trying to do the right thing got bureaucratic silence in return.
This process dragged on for years and the stress mounted. He saw no resolution. It was absurd: a debt he didn’t owe was growing, while the IRS held back his $1,800 refund. The financial pressure and emotional toll broke him.
Making things worse, Kirby lost his wife, Norma Jean, in August 2024. She was the one managing every aspect of his life, including the paperwork related to this trouble. Suddenly, he was all alone, both in life and in dealing with a problem he had been trying to resolve for years. He didn’t know how to navigate this federal nightmare alone. He was just an elderly farmer lost in grief, running the farm and fighting a battle against an agency that wouldn't acknowledge its own mistake. And for that, he was about to lose his own farm. An IRS notice reportedly warned Kirby that if he did not pay the interest it said he owed, he risked having his property seized.
His battle made it to the news
With no options left, Kirby turned to the media, hoping they could help him fight his battle. This spring, a reporter from WTVF brought the Tennessee farmer’s ordeal to light, detailing his four-year struggle with the IRS and the financial and emotional toll it had taken on him.
The coverage caught the attention of John Rich, the country music artist appointed as Special Envoy for American Landowners. Rich, who was in Italy, saw the coverage and decided to step in, leveraging his position to untangle what four years of official channels couldn't. “Well, Mr. Kirby is a landowner, and his land is under threat, and he didn’t do anything wrong, and he is at his wits’ end with this thing, and I want to see what I can do,” Rich told the broadcaster.
In a video shared on X in July this year, Rich assured viewers that Mr Kirby’s land wouldn’t be at risk and that the whole issue would soon be resolved. “Nobody is taking Mr Kirby’s farm. This is about to get HANDLED,” the singer said. Following this, in September, he met Kirby and assured him that the issue would be dealt with.
