AAaLot

Well said. Many people do not believe that one thing will lead to another ... but when government is concerned every example in history shows this be correct.

When employers became responsible for collecting child support they were not compensated for this extra service they were performing for the government. What next: lunch time jail enforcement for certain employees? Would make sense...

It is the job of every American, especially the ones in the Safety and Security forum , to oppose extra regulation regardless how good and logical it sound on the day proposed.

LLM

Chilling quote a the end from a victim: "You know, I was educated, I had a good job, I'd never been involved with the cops before, I had nothing to fear, nothing to run from. But still, I got tied into it....I can see where this stuff could create many victims."

LLM

No, we are not compensated for doing their dirty work, even when required to continue to withhold and remit to a court funds for a child living with her married parents, both of whom were our employees.

Even worse, considering how small we are, we receive orders for people who have never worked for us or haven't for many years, with threatening language, of course.

Dovster

If someone owes your company money but refuses to pay, would you go to court? If so, if the judge garnished his salary would you tell the judge to forget about it?

AAaLot

One wrong does not justify anther wrong. In the case you described you are involving a third party [i.e. the employer] to do the dirty work for free.

Dovster

Not really. About all the employer might be able to complain about is the cost of the postage to send the garnishment to the legal recipient.

Look at it this way: If I steal $1000 from someone, and give it to you for safekeeping (not telling you that it was stolen), a judge would certainly have the right to order you to return it to the proper owner, not to me.

This is exactly the same thing. A judge has determined that I owe X amount of dollars to (former wife/credit card company/retail store) etc.

You, my employer, in turn owe me my salary. The judge rules that part of my salary is no longer my money. It belongs to the person/company who holds my debt. The judge orders you to give that money to the legal owner.

If I had sufficient money in my bank account, he could also have ordered the bank to remit it to the owner.

Jaimito Cartero

This reminds me of someone who worked for me for about a month, 8 years ago, in a company that no longer exists. I recently got a letter from the Child Support Enforcement asking me to fill out dozens of pages in reference to garnishing his wages. It was the funniest thing I had seen all week.

LLM

Perhaps you have never worked in accounting/payroll/personnel but the cost is far higher than "postage." For us it was a tedious manual procedure outside our automated Paychex service with much attention to detail to avoid the heavy fines for errors or non-compliance.

LLM

Actually no. We use a collections service that sends letters and then we drop it. There is an out of business entity that owes us $25K but I wouldn't waste legal fees harrassing an old man who has lost his life's work or try to garnish his Social Security check. Sadly, our previous liquidator also stiffed us, by dropping dead of cancer. I suppose you think we should have gotten a judgment against his "estate?" Ethics are more important than collecting blood from a stone.

Unfortunately, most of these "deadbeat dads" barely earn minimum wage or work full time and are no more able to pay than our deceased liquidator. Ours were our lowest paid employees, including one whose incompetence we tolerated precisely because children of three mothers were depending on him until he mercifully quit. One wonders what non-apparent characteristic he had that led so many women to procreate with him.

At my first job out of grad school, I had a secretary whose ex-husband only paid when he worked washing cars which wasn't often enough. She went to court and the county put him in jail. For a nice family weekend, she could take the children to visit him there.

sonora

I quit using Paychex because of multiple mistakes they made.

However, if you forward the garnishment to Paychex, they should be able tomanage the withholding and compliance. It is not difficult, in fact is far easier that calculating other mandatory withholdings.

Child support witholdings are so basic anyone reasonably familiar with basic arithmetic functions should easily be able to calculate them. Then it's a matter of printing a check and sticking it in a stamped envelope.

LLM

Right. The employee that does this works for free and of course we are not talking about one check or one entity receiving them. If these government entities want the money, they should collect it themselves. I am not their enforcer.

AAaLot

Well said.

It is harder and more time consuming than you would guess. Anyone that disagrees has never owned their own company or worked in a payroll dept.

More importantly even if the work was easy the employer is still not being compensated for this extra service being performed for unrelated third parties.

Maybe neighbors should be in charge of keeping tabs of deadbeat neighbors because it is easy for them to do it? [much easier than the police having to come by]

sonora

It's a cost of doing business in the system, like jury duty.

I not only own my own business=a law firm with about 20 employees-I also garnish a lot of people. it's really no big deal, and if your payroll employees can't cope with a garnishment I can guarantee you they aren't doing your withholding correctly, and that comes with much more penalties.

AAaLot

Yes, but it wasn't a cost before--it just got magically added one year. An employer should not be in charge of enforcing debts between unrelated parties. Two wrongs don't make a right.

Back to the topic, government powers ALWAYS expand beyond their original intent. Linking passports to dead beat dads sounds good today, but history is clear on the unintended conclusion we will get.

More and more everyone is in technical violation of some law. It will be easy to link this to not getting a passport some day.

sailman

I think many of these posts are missing the primary danger of withholding a passport until child support is paid. While I wholeheartedly agree that one is responsible for any child one brings into this world, withholding a return passport could very seriously compromise the security of the United States, especially in the face of being at an ORANGE alert level.

Someone overseas desperately wanting to return but unable to raise the funds demanded could seek the money from the "bad guys" in return for providing a service or information. So now we have the government, tacitly encouraging increasing the risk to the land of the free and the home of the brave.

Stay the curse!