A few days ago I received a letter in the mail from the IRS saying that I owe them $1400 because they sent me a refund in December 2024 that I was not entitled to. I already verified that this is true, that is not the issue I'm facing. Here is the situation:
I called them this morning, and while waiting for them to pick up I finally decided to create an account with ID.me as recommended by a friend (I didnt have an account yet, I'm an F1 student here and did not kniw about it previously). After making the account, I immediatly saw three different notices about this exact issue. One from January 2025, one from April 2025, and one from April 2026. Apparently this has been an issue ever since last year, and its been accumulating interest and penalty fines all this time, so now it says I owe around $1600. The thing is, I never received a single letter about this until now.
Shortly after seeing that, a representative finally answered the call. They then checked my account and said I owed exactly $212. Their explanation was that this year's refund of $1188 that I was expecting was used to pay off part of the amount I owe, so now I only owed the rest. I then tried explaining the interest and penalties, and they attempted to transfer me. 30 minutes later the call randomly ended.
Thats where I am. I plan on calling them early tomorrow again to ask exactly how much I need to pay. My main question is, if I owe exactly $212, what in gods green earth happened to all the interest and penalties I haven't paid yet?