Creditor garnishment is the category where state law does the most work. Support orders and federal tax levies operate under largely uniform federal frameworks. Ordinary creditor garnishment, by contrast, is governed by a federal floor of protection layered under fifty different state regimes — with different caps, different exemptions, different answer deadlines, different forms, and in a few states an outright prohibition.

An employer that processes creditor ...

An IRS wage levy is not a garnishment with a different name. It works on inverted logic, and an employer that processes it like a creditor garnishment will get it badly wrong.

A creditor garnishment says: withhold a percentage, protect the rest. An IRS levy says: protect a small calculated amount, and send everything else. That inversion is why employees are so frequently shocked by their first levied paycheck, and why payroll needs to understand the mechanic before ...

Wage garnishment is the area of payroll where an employer can be made to pay an employee's debt out of company funds. That single fact should shape how the function is staffed and controlled, because it makes garnishment processing meaningfully different from every other payroll task: the penalty for getting it wrong is not a fine calculated on the error, it is potentially the entire amount that should have been withheld.

This guide covers the mechanics that apply ...

Travel time is the most frequently mishandled category of compensable time, for a structural reason: the rules are counterintuitive, they turn on distinctions employees do not perceive as meaningful, and the amounts are small enough per instance that nobody escalates them — until someone does, on behalf of an entire job classification.

This guide covers each travel scenario, states the rule, and flags the overtime consequence, which is usually larger than the travel pay ...

"Exempt" is not a compliment, a seniority marker, or a synonym for salaried. It is a narrow statutory carve-out from the Fair Labor Standards Act's minimum wage and overtime requirements, and the burden of proving it falls entirely on the employer. Exemptions are construed narrowly, which means a close call is generally decided against the employer.

This guide covers both tests every exemption requires, each recognized exemption and where it fails, the salary basis rules that can ...

Executive compensation is where payroll stops being a processing function and becomes a tax function. The instruments involved — non-qualified options, incentive stock options, restricted stock, restricted stock units, and non-qualified deferred compensation — each have their own taxable event, their own withholding treatment, and their own reporting obligation. Getting the timing wrong is not a rounding error; it can trigger penalty regimes that fall on the ...

Supplemental wages are where routine payroll produces non-routine mistakes. The withholding rules are genuinely simple — there are two methods and one mandatory override. The problems come from everything that happens around the payment: the overtime it retroactively changes, the deposit threshold it trips, the wage base it crosses, and the employee expectation it violates.

This guide covers the withholding mechanics first, then the four second-order effects that cause most ...

Multi-state payroll used to be a problem for large employers with physical locations in several states. Remote work made it a problem for everyone. A ten-person company with one employee who moved to a different state now has the same structural obligations as a company with a branch office there — registration, withholding, unemployment insurance, new hire reporting, and possibly a paid leave contribution.

The governing principle is simple and almost universally misunderstood: ...