§ 8.01-511.1.Garnishee inability to determine whether it holds property of judgment debtor.

Not every garnishee has a wage-withholding relationship with a clean paper trail. A bank holding thousands of accounts, or a business with a common customer name, might have no way to tell whether a particular summons points to their customer at all. Section 8.01-511.1 addresses that identification problem for garnishments of property other than wages, salaries, commissions, or other earnings.

If the summons does not give the garnishee enough to reasonably identify the debtor, the garnishee has no liability for failing to hand over property. The statute draws a bright line for what counts as enough: either the debtor’s Social Security or taxpayer identification number as it appears in the garnishee’s own records, or the debtor’s name and address as they appear there.

When the summons does clear that bar, the garnishee has real obligations: answer the court, state the debtor’s last known address on file and any other relevant information, and separately send the debtor a copy of that answer. A financial institution has one more step first — before answering, it must run the account through the automatic-exemption examination required by § 34-4.3 or § 34-4.4 and act on what that review shows.

A garnishee or creditor who follows this statute in good faith gets a liability shield against a mistaken-identification claim from either side, as long as the process was followed in good faith.