Overbilled and out of luck

A Wake County man whose wages were wrongly double garnished for past-due child support after he had already settled his debt — a mistake that cost him more than $15,000 — has no remedy, according to the North Carolina Court of Appeals.

The court found that Ollie Williams Jr. failed to file suit within the three-year statute of limitations, even though he sued to recover his losses less than two years after the county’s social services division stopped garnishing his wages from two jobs. He argued that the so-called “continuing wrong” doctrine applied to his case.

But Judge Wanda Bryant, who wrote the three-judge panel’s unanimous decision, found that the clock started ticking on Williams’s claims either in 2010, when he alleged that his wages were first double garnished — or in 2011, when he claimed that he’d paid his $15,981 debt and his case was closed.

Despite that fact, the county continued to double garnish his wages, taking an additional $15,241 over the next two years. Williams sued in 2015, alleging fraud, breach of fiduciary duty and violations of the state constitution and 14th Amendment.

“By the logic they [the court] used, the statute of limitations would’ve run before they even took the money,” said Williams’s appellate attorney, Andrew Kisala of the Kisala Watkins Law Group in Durham. “How could the statute of limitations expire prior to the act giving rise to the cause of action? It’s a legal impossibility.”

Kisala added that Williams knew that his wages were being improperly garnished, but he waited to take legal action because he had a bad experience earlier when he filed a pro se motion to modify his child support payments.

He thought he was overpaying, but the judge disagreed and found that he owed more than $7,200. The judge subsequently jailed Williams for civil contempt for failing to comply with the child support order.

“This made him reluctant to go back to court and contest the double garnishment,” Kisala said. “He wasn’t just sitting there not paying attention. He knew what was happening. He was just afraid to deal with it.”

Attempts to speak with Wake County Attorney Scott Warren and Senior Assistant County Attorney Allison Cooper were unsuccessful.

Charles Ullman, a child support lawyer in Raleigh who reviewed the opinion at Lawyers Weekly’s request, was concerned about the ramifications of the court’s decision against Williams.

“If a mortgage company kept drafting your bank account after the mortgage was paid in full there would be all kinds of remedies,” he said. “Yet this guy has an order for child support and he has no remedy.”

The Court of Appeals issued the Feb. 21 decision as unpublished, but later granted Williams’s motion to publish the opinion.

Kisala argues that the court’s finding is “in contravention with a lot of the existing findings in our case law.” He believed the Supreme Court would be more apt to hear the case if the appellate decision was published. He and Williams were still contemplating their next move.

The 19-page decision is Williams v. Rojano (Lawyers Weekly No. 012-045-17). A digest of the opinion is available at nclawyersweekly.com.

Follow Phillip Bantz on Twitter @NCLWBantz