Wage garnishment orders

Detects wage garnishee notices and earnings attachment orders served on an employer for an identified employee: ATO garnishee notices (TAA 1953 Sch 1 s 260-5), Services Australia child support and debt garnishee notices, court attachment of earnings / income withholding orders, with the amount owing or amount to deduct.

Type: regex
Engine: boost_regex
Confidence: medium
Confidence justification: Medium: the primary phrases also appear in policies, guidance, blank forms and news, so enforce tiers require a populated field with a non-placeholder value and 85 adds a record-specific populated detail plus independent corroboration. Person and record values are customer-defined, so the field regexes use labelled loose values with a placeholder guard. 85/75 are heuristic evidence tiers, not measured accuracy.
Detection quality: Topic false positive
Jurisdictions: au, global
Regulations: Taxation Administration Act 1953 (Cth), Child Support (Registration and Collection) Act 1988 (Cth), Privacy Act 1988 (Cth), Information Privacy Act 2009 (Qld)
Frameworks: ISO 27001, ISO 27701
Data categories: financial, employment, pii
Scope: wide
Risk rating: 4
Platform compatibility: Purview: Compatible, GCP DLP: Compatible, Macie: Compatible, Zscaler: Compatible, Palo Alto: Degraded, Netskope: Unsupported

Pattern

(?i)\b(?:wage\s+garnishment(?:\s+orders?)?|garnishee\s+(?:notices?|orders?)|attachment\s+of\s+earnings\s+orders?|income\s+withholding\s+orders?|child\s+support\s+(?:employer\s+)?deduction\s+(?:notices?|advices?)|notice\s+to\s+deduct\s+child\s+support)\b

Corroborative evidence keywords

section 260-5, Taxation Administration Act, Child Support, Services Australia, remit, deductions to start, first pay after, court, payroll

Proximity: 300 characters

Should match

Garnishee notice - section 260-5, Schedule 1, Taxation Administration Act 1953 Employee name: Riley Teston Payroll number: 88213 Amount owing: $6,420.00 Amount to be deducted: $150.00 per pay Deductions to start from the first pay after 01/11/2026. — 85: ATO garnishee notice with employee, payroll number, amount owing and deduction
Child support deduction notice Employee: Casey Teston Deduct per fortnight: $212.00 Protected earnings amount: $498.00 Remit to Services Australia by the 21st of the following month. — 85: child support deduction notice with employee, deduction and protected earnings
Attachment of earnings order Debtor: Jordan Staffson The order has been received and payroll will be contacted separately. — 75: attachment of earnings order naming the debtor, no amounts
garnishee notice — 65: bare phrase only - discovery tier

Should not match

A garnishee notice is one of the firmer actions we may take to collect an unpaid tax debt. Before we issue a garnishee notice we send a warning letter. — ATO-style guidance - must stay at or below 65
Garnishee notice Employee name: __________ Amount owing: $__________ Amount to be deducted: $__________ — Blank garnishee notice - must stay at or below 65
The court ordered wage garnishment for unpaid fines, according to a media release. — News - must stay at or below 65
unrelated generic text without domain phrases — No relevant topic phrases present

Known false positives

Policies, procedures, regulator guidance, fact sheets and training material that name the record type. Mitigation: Enforce tiers require populated fields; guidance has labels without values, and policy/guidance/training/media-release framing is excluded by the NOT-group.
Blank forms, templates and system configuration screens. Mitigation: Blank lines, bracket placeholders, XXX and n/a/tbc values are rejected by the placeholder guard; template/fixture words are excluded by template-exclusion.
News, statistics and vendor marketing. Mitigation: No populated person or record fields, so these stay at 65 discovery.
Bank-account garnishee notices (not wages) carry the same phrase. Mitigation: Accepted: they are equally sensitive debt-enforcement records; person field still required for 75.