A wage garnishment or bank levy can take most of your income overnight. We move immediately to get it released and negotiate a resolution that keeps it from happening again.
A wage garnishment doesn't ease in gradually — it hits your very next paycheck, in full, and keeps hitting every paycheck after that until it's released. Unlike most creditors, the IRS doesn't need a court order to garnish your wages or freeze your bank account; it only needs to have sent the required notices and waited out the response window. By the time most people call us, the levy is already active.
Getting a levy released solves the immediate emergency, but it doesn't resolve the underlying debt. Once the pressure is off, we put a durable resolution in place — an installment agreement, an Offer in Compromise, or Currently Not Collectible status — so the IRS has no reason to come back for your paycheck.
Unlike a regular creditor, the IRS isn't capped at a flat 25%. A wage levy uses IRS Publication 1494 exemption tables, based on your filing status and number of dependents, to determine a small protected amount — and takes nearly everything above that. For most people this means most of each paycheck disappears until the levy is released.
Once we're engaged and have a signed Power of Attorney on file, we can often request a release or a hold on enforcement within days — especially if we can show the levy is causing economic hardship or if we get you into a qualifying resolution (installment agreement, OIC, or Currently Not Collectible status) quickly. Your employer keeps withholding under the existing levy until the IRS officially releases it, so speed matters.
A federal tax lien is the government's legal claim to your property — it doesn't take anything by itself, but it can affect your credit and your ability to sell or refinance. A levy is the actual seizure: garnishing wages, freezing a bank account, or taking other property. You can have a lien without a levy, but a wage garnishment is always a levy in action.
Yes — the IRS sends the levy notice (Form 668-W) directly to your employer's payroll department, and your employer is legally required to comply. There's no way around the employer being involved, but a released levy stops future withholding immediately once HR receives the release notice.
Sometimes. There's typically a 21-day holding period between when a bank receives a levy and when it must send the funds to the IRS — during that window we can often negotiate a release before the money is sent. Once funds have actually been transferred, reversal is rare but not always impossible, particularly in hardship or procedural-error situations.
The IRS will release a levy when the debt is paid, the statute of collections expires, releasing it would help you pay the debt, you enter an approved installment agreement, you're approved for an Offer in Compromise, or you can demonstrate the levy is causing economic hardship. We target whichever path gets you relief fastest.
Tell us what's happening and we'll tell you, today, what your fastest path to release looks like.
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