812.35.Commencement of action.

Section 812.35 lays out, step by step, how a creditor gets an earnings garnishment underway. It starts with filing a garnishment notice with the clerk of courts, though the section carves out one category of debt entirely: no earnings garnishment may be brought to recover what is owed on a payday loan. Once the notice is filed and the fee paid, the clerk issues two earnings garnishment forms for each garnishee, and a circuit court can, by local rule, let the clerk issue the forms before the notice itself is filed, so long as the notice follows within a set number of business days after the garnishee is served.

Service deadlines run on parallel 60-day clocks from the filing of the notice. The creditor must serve one form on the debtor by first class mail, certified mail with return receipt, or any method allowed for serving a summons other than publication, and must separately serve the other form on the garnishee by those same methods or by having the garnishee sign an admission of service. The creditor also has to tender the garnishee’s fee at the time of service on the garnishee, and must serve the debtor, at the same time as the debtor’s form, with an exemption notice, an answer form, and the poverty-line schedules and worksheets described elsewhere in the subchapter. Service on the debtor has its own tighter window: within 7 business days after serving the garnishee, and at least 3 business days before the first payday the garnishment would affect.

Once served, the garnishee has to make a quick assessment: will it likely owe the debtor earnings during pay periods beginning within the next 13 weeks? If not, it must notify the creditor by the end of the 7th business day, and the creditor passes that notice along to the court within another 7 business days. If the garnishee will likely owe earnings, but the debtor already has an earlier garnishment in effect, the garnishee holds the new form and puts it into effect only after the prior garnishment ends, notifying both the debtor and the creditor of the relevant amounts within that same 7-business-day window, and updating the creditor and court if its outlook later changes before the new garnishment ever takes effect.