Legal Question in Credit and Debt Law in Connecticut

Re: No notice of wage garnishment

When your employer is served with the execution s/he will give you a form which you can fill out and return to the court that issued the execution. This form includes a motion to modify the execution. You can move to modify it to zero, if you have the right grounds.

In the meantime, you can be proactive by going to this Website:

http://www.jud2.state.ct.us/Civil_Inquiry/GetParty.asp

You will enter your name in this format:

LASTNAME,FIRSTNAME (note that there is NO space after the comma), leave court location at ALL, and press SEARCH. If the judgment against you is in SUPERIOR court, you will find the case against you on the list that appears. (If it's not there, either the case was brought in small claims court, or your name was misspelled in the court database.) Click on the Docket Number, and you will be taken to a screen giving you much information about the case, including the name and address of the creditor's attorney, and the location of the court where the suit was brought.

Next, the question is whether you were properly served with notice of the law suit. Go to the courthouse and look at the file, or try to get a clerk to pull the file for you. Either way, you want to read the what the serving officer wrote about how s/he served you, and where. If s/he said s/he served you at your usual place of abode, and you were not living at that address at the time of service, you have grounds to have the judgment opened, no matter how long ago it entered. Note that you will have to PROVE to a sceptical judge that you were living somewhere else at the time.

In any event, the next thing to do is put together your proof that the debt to the car company was fully paid long ago. Show that proof to the creditor's attorney. Just remember this: If you expect him/her to be willing to consider your proof with an open mind, YOUR mind has to be open to the possibility that you were wrong about having paid it off -- you may have to consider evidence that there were charges that weren't paid, and that you do owe SOME money on this.