Electronic Income Withholding Orders (e-IWO)
The Income Withholding Order (IWO) process has been a critical part of the child support enforcement program for many years. In almost all states, a paper IWO is mailed to an employer to initiate the income withholding. In an effort to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of the IWO process,
the Federal Office of Child Support Enforcement initiated a project in August 2004 called the electronic Income Withholding Order (e-IWO) to enable states and employers to exchange IWO documents electronically. This project developed standardized layouts, workflows, and processes that are to be used by states and employers for transmitting IWOs electronically. In addition, an electronic acknowledgement process was developed that enables employers to efficiently notify states, tribes or territories about the status of an existing e-IWO document they have received.
The electronic transmission of IWOs will increase processing efficiency and improve the speed with which payments are made to families by:
- reducing the time from IWO preparation to employer processing,
- reducing errors that can occur through manual processing,
- reducing cost of postage and processing paper documents and,
- providing an on-going communications link between child support enforcement agencies and employers should additional actions be necessary.
The following information provides states, tribes, territories, and employers with the information to participate in the e-IWO project.
 
