Thank you in advance for your help. I live in Missouri and hold a joint checking account with my partner. We are not married. Our checking account has been levied by a collection agency from a credit card he held from many years before we met. My federal tax return was direct deposited into that account and seized. Do I have any possible way to have that returned to me? I am not listed as any part of this collection effort.

A joint account is owned 100% by each of you - either one of you can deposit or withdraw from the account. It is not 50% yours and 50% your partner's.

The total belongs to both of you.

The age of the debt does not matter unless the time to collect has expired, and I doubt it has.

You just learned a very brutal lesson about joint accounts. I appreciate that the IRS refund was yours alone but the argument about segregated funds within an account is that there is no way to tell what monies were used, for example, to pay the electric bill and which monies were untouched.

Do you know what I mean?

Thank you for your response. I was afraid of this. I tried to have the direct deposit stopped by both the IRS and HR block and the bank. The refund came too quickly for me to get the paper work filed and mailed in time. Only took 7 days for the refund to come through and I had 2 days notice that that account had been seized. Devastating lesson indeed!

You know if you needed the refund desparately it would have taken months - !

You can always try to claim it's somehow protected funds, but I don't think you will win the argument.