When Two Garnishments Quietly Doubled Up on One Paycheque

The situation

Carmela brought home about 1,650 dollars every two weeks before deductions, working full time as a dishwasher at a restaurant in Orleans. From that already modest pay, the Canada Revenue Agency was taking a fixed amount every pay period under a wage garnishment tied to roughly 9,000 dollars in old tax debt, the result of three years she had not filed returns for while also picking up part time catering shifts that never got reported properly.

Then, that spring, a second number appeared on the same pay stub. Carmela and Giulia, her partner of six years, had separated, and a family support arrangement now required Carmela to pay Giulia a set amount every two weeks as well, deducted directly from her pay alongside the Canada Revenue Agency garnishment. Giulia worked as a landscaper, seasonal and inconsistent through the winter months, and the support payment had been calculated on the assumption that Carmela's income was what it looked like on paper, before either garnishment came off.

Between the two deductions, Carmela's take-home pay dropped by close to a third. What was left did not comfortably cover rent on the small apartment she had moved into after the separation, let alone groceries, transit, or anything beyond the basics. She fell behind on rent twice in two months and started skipping meals near the end of each pay period.

The restaurant's bookkeeper, Rizki, was the one who first flagged that something looked off, noticing that Carmela's net pay after both deductions had fallen well below what payroll systems generally treat as a reasonable floor for someone in her income bracket, and mentioned it to her directly rather than saying nothing. Carmela had not known that a wage garnishment for a government debt could be reduced on hardship grounds if she asked, and had assumed the deduction was simply fixed and non negotiable, something to be endured rather than challenged. She also had not realized that the timing of the two garnishments, arriving within weeks of each other, meant nobody administering either one had accounted for the other, since the Canada Revenue Agency's collections file and the family support deduction order were handled by two completely separate systems with no reason to talk to each other. By the time she came to us, Carmela was current on neither her rent nor entirely clear on how much of her pay was actually being taken each period.

What the documents showed

When we requested Carmela's pay stubs, her Canada Revenue Agency collections history, and the family support deduction order together, the picture the documents showed was different from what Carmela had assumed. The wage garnishment tied to the tax debt had been set as a flat dollar amount years earlier, calculated against Carmela's income at a point when she had been working more hours and picking up regular catering shifts, income that had since dropped once she moved to a single job. Unlike an ordinary creditor, the Canada Revenue Agency can issue a requirement to pay directly to an employer without going to court first, and the provincial exemptions that protect part of an ordinary paycheque do not bind it; in practice it takes roughly half of employment income, and can take considerably more from other kinds of payments. There is no automatic floor for living expenses built into that authority; the agency will reduce or lift a garnishment that is causing genuine hardship, but only once the debtor asks and lays out a full picture of income and expenses, which is exactly why a garnishment set years earlier against a higher income figure had simply kept running, untouched, until someone raised it.

The family support deduction order told a different, more complicated story. It had been calculated using Carmela's gross income, the number that appeared on her employment records, and that was not itself a mistake: child support is calculated from the payor's income under the Guidelines tables, not from what is left over after other commitments, so the fact that a chunk of Carmela's pay was already gone to the Canada Revenue Agency garnishment did not, on its own, lower what she owed under the order. What the order had never been tested against was the size of the garnishment stacked on top of it, and bringing the support payment down for that reason meant a specific undue hardship claim, not a recalculation nobody had thought to do.

Put together, the two documents showed that Carmela's tax garnishment had been set against stale income, while her support order, though correctly calculated on her actual income, had never been tested against how much the garnishment stacked on top of it was leaving her to live on. Neither the Canada Revenue Agency collections officer nor the family support office had any visibility into what the other was taking, and the combined effect left Carmela with less monthly income than either garnishment, on its own, was designed to allow for. Rizki's payroll records were the clearest evidence of this: two separate deduction codes, applied to the same gross pay, stacking on top of each other every single pay period without any coordination.

The documents also showed something useful for the negotiation ahead: Carmela's tax filings, once properly completed for the years in question, actually reduced the underlying debt slightly from the original estimate the Canada Revenue Agency had used to set the garnishment, since some of her catering income had been overstated based on incomplete third party records. That gap, on its own, gave us a legitimate basis to ask the agency to revisit both the debt figure and the garnishment amount together.

What we did

1. Filed the outstanding returns with corrected income figures. We gathered Carmela's actual catering pay stubs and reconciled them against the estimated income the Canada Revenue Agency had used to calculate her original debt, which had been based on incomplete third party reporting rather than her real earnings. Filing accurate returns for the years in question reduced the underlying tax debt by a modest but meaningful amount and gave us solid ground to argue the original garnishment had been set against an out of date figure.
2. Requested a hardship review of the wage garnishment. We submitted a formal request asking the Canada Revenue Agency to reassess the fixed dollar garnishment against Carmela's actual current income and expenses, using her pay stubs and a basic budget showing rent, groceries, and transit costs, since a garnishment set years earlier against a different income level is not automatically revisited unless someone asks.
3. Proposed a garnishment set as a percentage of pay instead of a flat amount. A percentage based garnishment adjusts automatically as income changes, which meant Carmela would not need to reopen the same hardship argument every time her hours changed, and it gave the Canada Revenue Agency a collection method that scaled fairly with what she actually earned rather than assuming a fixed income that no longer existed.
4. Filed an undue hardship claim on the family support order. Because a large Canada Revenue Agency garnishment was already coming off Carmela's pay before the support deduction applied, we brought a formal undue hardship claim asking that circumstance be recognized, since the order's income figure was correctly calculated and would not adjust on its own just because another debt was competing for the same paycheque.
5. Sequenced the two garnishments so neither order assumed the other did not exist. Once both offices were aware of each other, we worked out an order of priority and adjusted amounts so the combined deductions left Carmela with a livable amount of income each pay period, rather than each office independently taking its full share as though it were the only claim on her pay.
6. Confirmed the reduced garnishment and support figures in writing with Rizki's payroll office. We made sure the restaurant's payroll system was updated with the new deduction codes and amounts on both fronts, and asked Rizki to flag any discrepancy in future pay periods so a similar stacking problem could not recur without someone noticing quickly. Getting the confirmation in writing, rather than relying on a verbal update between two government offices and a small employer, meant there was a paper trail to point to immediately if either deduction reverted to its old amount by mistake.
7. Set up a short repayment plan for the rent Carmela had fallen behind on. With more income now reaching her each period, we helped Carmela work out a modest catch up arrangement with her landlord directly, separate from the tax and support file but necessary to stabilize her situation while the other changes took effect. Addressing the arrears while the garnishment relief was still fresh meant the extra income went toward closing the gap right away, instead of quietly absorbing into daily expenses and leaving the back rent unresolved indefinitely.

The outcome

Within about ten weeks of the hardship request being filed, the Canada Revenue Agency replaced the flat dollar garnishment with a percentage based deduction calculated against Carmela's actual pay, a change that immediately reduced what came off her paycheque in the weeks her hours were lighter and kept the deduction proportionate going forward. Combined with the corrected tax filings, which trimmed the underlying debt itself, Carmela's Canada Revenue Agency deduction dropped by roughly forty percent from what she had been paying before, a change that showed up on her very next pay stub rather than months later.

The family support deduction was adjusted as well: the undue hardship claim was granted, and the amount was reduced to account for the size of the tax garnishment already coming off Carmela's pay, which brought that payment down to a level Giulia and Carmela both accepted as fair given what Carmela actually had left to live on. Giulia's own seasonal income as a landscaper meant she was not in a position to simply forgo the support, so this was not a case of one side getting everything; it was two legitimate garnishments finally sized against the same real number instead of stacking blind, an outcome that left both women with a figure they could live with rather than one that quietly punished them both.

Between the two changes, Carmela's monthly take-home pay increased by enough to consistently cover rent and groceries with a small cushion left over, something that had not been true since the separation. She caught up on the back rent within three months and stopped needing to choose between bills each pay period, a shift she described as the first time in almost a year that a pay stub had not made her stomach drop.

The tax debt itself was not eliminated, only reduced and put on a fairer collection schedule, and Carmela will keep paying toward it until it is cleared. Rizki's early flag on the payroll stacking issue turned out to matter more than anyone expected at the time; without that observation, the two garnishments might have kept compounding against each other for months longer before anyone connected the two files, and Carmela's situation would have kept getting worse instead of stabilizing when it did.

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