Retention Date: 03/07/2025
A. Purpose
The purpose of this Emergency Message (EM) is to inform Field Office (FO) and Processing Center (PC) technicians of a new handling process for Electronic Income Withholding Order (e-IWO) rejects.
B. Background
The initial input of garnishment Income Withholding Orders (IWOs) is primarily the responsibility of FOs and PC. The PC technicians currently work garnishment orders served directly to them and will now process three types of e-IWO rejects through the Court Order Garnishment System (COGS).
· NOTE: WSU Technicians normally do not process Garnishment Orders and the order may be referred to the local FO or PC for processing, since this is primarily a Post Entitlement workload.
In February 2012, use of an electronic process began. Under the electronic process, participating states and jurisdictions send e-IWOs to SSA and, if successful, the process updates COGS and stores a copy of the order in the Online Retrieval System (ORS). Thus, requires no input from FOs or PCs.
Currently, when an e-IWO reject occurs, COGS does not update the record and does not store copy of the order into ORS. Therefore, the states and jurisdictions mail or fax the rejected IWOs for manual input.
C. Updated e-IWO Reject Process
The e-IWO reject process will be updated to accept three types of reject reasons:
1. Participating states and jurisdictions will continue to send garnishment orders directly to SSA as electronic files.
2. The three reject reasons will include;
§ Name Not Matched
§ Case Number Not Matched for Termination (TRM)
§ Other With Termination (T) Order Status Code
3. A new Action Control Record (ACR) will be created in Paperless under the CHECK/GARNISH/EIWO/REJECT TOEL’s and assigned to the appropriate technician to manually input the order into COGS. A Copy of the order will be stored in ORS.
4. The Office of Child Support Enforcement (OCSE) is notified of the reject, informed of the manual input by SSA, and instructed not to forward the rejected order to their local FO or PC.
Direct all program related and technical questions to your Regional Office (RO) support staff or Operations Analysis (OA) staff. RO support staff or OA staff may refer questions, concerns, or problems to their Central Office contacts.
References:
GN 02410.210 “Processing Paper Garnishment Orders in the Field Office or Processing Center”
GN 02410.224 “Electronic Income Withholding Orders”