Reply #44: The wronged spouse can speed things up easily by sending a copy of the court order in to the [View All]

[MADem]

servicemember's command.

The term you're looking for when they do a garnishment of all the pay, or most of it, due to indebtedness or failure to provide support or what have you, is a "health and comfort" allowance. Enough to buy toothpaste, get a haircut, buy new skivvies, and here's your chow pass, because half the time you're on restriction!

It used to be easy to duck out on those support and court ordered payments--no longer. The transition from individual, locally administered disbursing offices to the centralized DFAS system (with the right password and authorizations, you can access anyone's pay, from anywhere in the world, from a PC--quite a change from the typed and mailed, and later, message-trafficked, pay changes) has totally changed the pay landscape in that regard. And direct deposit is mandatory--no ifs, ands, or buts.

The judgments follow the servicemember even if he or she transfers, because they're annotated at the DOD level, not the unit level. If you want the garnishment to stop, you have to proactively prove that it needs to stop.