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Garnishment, in plain English.
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A garnishment is a court-ordered or agency-ordered deduction from employee wages, used to enforce child support, tax debt, or an unpaid judgment.
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Employers must honour a valid order and apply the statutory protected-earnings minimum that shields part of the employee's pay from deduction. Workzoom Payroll tracks multiple garnishments per employee with priority ordering and protected-earnings limits you configure per jurisdiction.
How Garnishment works.
A garnishment is a legally mandated deduction from pay, directed by a court, tax authority, or family support agency and remitted to a third party. The employer acts as collection agent with statutory duties: apply the correct calculation base, respect exempt-earnings floors, order multiple garnishments by priority, and remit on schedule. Failing any of these generally transfers liability to the employer.
Where Garnishment goes wrong.
- Deducting against gross pay when the order specifies disposable earnings after mandatory deductions is the most common calculation error, and it overstates every payment sent to the third party.
- Applying multiple orders in the sequence they arrived rather than in statutory priority order can shortchange a higher-priority creditor, such as child support, in favour of one that arrived first.
- The order carries no built-in stop, so continuing to deduct after the balance is satisfied is a separate failure that requires the employer to catch it and reimburse the employee.
- 2000 Running payroll since Workzoom has run Canadian payroll for 25+ years.
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- SOC 2-aligned controls Encrypted at rest, role-based access, immutable audit logs.
- Trusted in production County of Renfrew, Silvera for Seniors, and Cable Bahamas. Built for 50 to 5,000 employees.
In the product
How Garnishment runs on Workzoom.
Garnishment is part of the Workzoom Payroll Suite. Workzoom runs HR, workforce, and talent on a single employee record across ten countries: Canada, the United States, the Bahamas, Jamaica, Trinidad and Tobago, Barbados, Antigua and Barbuda, Anguilla, the Cayman Islands, and the United Kingdom. Full gross-to-net payroll runs live in Canada, the United States, and the Bahamas. Pricing starts at $4 per employee per suite per month.
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$4 per employee per suite. 50 to 5,000 employees. Sprint-based, client-paced go-live.