Treasury Must Act Now To Protect Relief Payments From Debt Collectors
The CARES Act provides for direct "rebate" payments to American households. Treasury is gearing up to send some of those payments out soon. But Congress forgot to protect the payments from garnishment. American families may see needed funds deposited into their bank accounts only to watch that money disappear. Slipster Dalié Jiménez, Chris Odinet, and I just published a short piece on the Harvard Law Review blog detailing this problem and proposing a simple solution that Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin should implement ASAP.
The optimism expressed in the Harvard piece, that this was an unintentional, inadvertent oversight that will of course be fixed, appears to be sorely misplaced. It's more likely a feature than a bug:
https://prospect.org/coronavirus/banks-can-grab-stimulus-check-pay-debts/
Posted by: FJP | April 15, 2020 at 11:34 AM