Something has quietly inserted itself as a staple of the district's monthly check register. And it's another one of those things that NOBODY wants to talk about.
Well, we NEED to talk about it, people, because it means something. We'll let you decide exactly what.Sure, Chef Gordon Ramsey would be hotter than Hell's Kitchen if a dish was served sans garnishment. But we don't think he's talking about THIS type of garnish.
Go back through the district check registers (they're available via BoardDocs). We looked at the the first meeting in September going back 5 years. Back in 2006 and 2007, we couldn't find ANY garnishment listings. Now, that might mean we missed a couple, as the school board packages back then were not offered in text-searchable PDF form. So you have to really scour them. But...in 2008, there were 3 monthly garnishment checks. 6 in 2009 and now 9 in the 2010. Something is wrong with this picture.
What is garnishment? A visit to every student's term paper friend, Wikipedia, yields the following:
Wage garnishment, the most common type of garnishment, is the process of deducting money from an employee's monetary compensation (including salary), sometimes as a result of a court order. Wage garnishments continue until the entire debt is paid or arrangements are made to pay off the debt. Garnishments can be taken for any type of debt but common examples of debt that result in garnishments include:
---child support
---defaulted student loans
---taxes
---unpaid court fines
Are Increasing Garnishments a Result of the Economy?
There sure looks to be a cause-and-effect relationship. Since we cannot be privy to the details (nor should we be...) we cannot make a definitive declaration on whether the rise in garnishments is related to people struggling financially...or whether it says something else about the district.
Regardless of the reason, this is something to which the board should be paying attention as they try to set a tax levy increase that will likely be 4.5% over last year. And we haven't heard anything about the Department of Revenue's equalized value statements....which do not effect the levy, but DO affect the mill rate for property taxes.
Wage Garnishments On The Rise April 2010
As the economy continues to sour and more people fall behind on their bills, more people find themselves being sued by their creditors, or more accurately, by debt collectors...
Garnishment Complications in a Hard Economy August 2010
The combination of a downturn in the economy and an upturn in wage attachments has created unexpected complications. It did not take a crystal ball to predict that employee garnishments would increase when employees' jobs and pay were negatively affected by the economy. But employers did not foresee how creditors and agencies would actually complicate the process by trying to "help out" debtors...
Posts
