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Why didn't the mother just use her private doctor on her yacht? (slrpnk.net)
submitted 9 months ago by to c/aboringdystopia@lemmy.world
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[–] 5 points 9 months ago (4 children)

Wage garnishment happens at the end of a long series of legal filings and claims against the debtor.

And, again, you can avoid it by changing jobs. Which is easy enough for someone in a low wage service sector that very few debt collectors bother trying.

You tend to push for wage garnishment when the person is in a job they can't easily leave - partner at a law firm, manager at a Fortune 500 company, tenured professor - not someone who can walk across the street and land a new job doing the same work at the same pay over the weekend.

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  • [–] 3 points 9 months ago (2 children)

    So this goes through the employer then? Not through like the IRS who can just take stuff from any paycheck?

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  • [–] 3 points 9 months ago

    So if you owe money to some federal entity or a state entity, they can skip the line and garnish your wages, but if it's just some collections agency, they would have to sue you first, and only with a court order could they garnish your wages.

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  • [–] 3 points 9 months ago

    The IRS withholds taxes from your paystub based on your W2. You can technically zero out your withholdings from the IRS, but this can incur penalties and it exposes your employer to annoying audit requests, so its discouraged at the HR level.

    Paycheck withholds that come through a court order are something different entirely. And you'd really need to sit down with an actual Employment Law expert to get the fine details, as they can vary by state and county as well as by how you get paid (salary versus contractor, etc). Which agent actually gets to deduct money from your paystub, how it is escrowed, when the collector can access the money, how that deducts from your total debts, etc isn't federalized.

    But I can say with some degree of confidence that unless you owe money to the IRS, the IRS isn't involved.

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