Understanding Wage Attachments for Employees

In many countries, employers are responsible for collecting and distributing child support and other wage attachments. As an employer, you might be required by law (by way of a court order) to deduct a certain amount of the employee's pay and remit it to an individual or agency to satisfy the employee's debt. Failure to deduct and remit could subject the organization to penalties, fines, and interest. Therefore, you must accurately calculate deduction amounts and maintain wage attachment history by employee.

The JD Edwards EnterpriseOne Payroll system includes a feature, called the wage attachment workbench, that you can use to administer voluntary and involuntary wage withholding orders. You can track detailed information for each wage attachment and calculate complex deductions. For example, you can:

• Track detailed wage attachment information, such as the case number for the wage attachment.

• Define specific calculation rules.

• Track detailed history for a wage attachment, including amounts deducted, deduction dates, and payee information.

You can also manage the complexities of administering multiple wage attachments for employees. When an employee has multiple wage attachments, you need to determine the priority of each one. Priorities determine the order in which each wage attachment is deducted when an employee does not have enough disposable wages to satisfy all of the wage attachments. To do this, you must consider each court order, as well as federal and local regulations. You can specify the priority of each deduction at the wage attachment level or at the employee level. You can also override the system-defined priorities if necessary.

In addition, you can specify calculation rules for situations when employees have multiple wage attachments. These rules can be set up at the deduction, benefit, accrual (DBA) level, the employee level, or the wage attachment level. For example, government regulations might specify that child support withholding cannot exceed 65 percent of an employee's disposable earnings. In addition, they might also specify that, if child support is less than 25 percent of disposable earnings, that the combined total of all child support and commercial garnishments cannot exceed 25 percent of disposable earnings.

In this situation, if an employee had a child support wage attachment that was set to calculate at 20 percent, and a commercial garnishment that was set to calculate at 10 percent, the wage attachment rule would adjust the wage attachment with the lowest priority so that the combined deduction does not exceed 25 percent of disposable earnings.

The wage attachment workbench is designed to accommodate these involuntary and voluntary wage assignments:

• Tax levy (involuntary wage attachment).

• Child support (involuntary wage assignment).

• Garnishment (involuntary wage attachment).

• Loans (voluntary payroll deductions)