Theres a good workaround for this in one of the webinars from Garry Pye. What you do is duplicate the character and change every sprite to empty, except the arms. Then this arms only character can go in front of the desk.

Oops! My bad. I see that you are using Cartoon Animator.  Being that is the case, I'm lost on that one, as I have not started to use the program on a regular basis. 

Are you trying to accomplish this in Iclone?

Hi,
I have a character sitting at a desk.  The desk layer needs to be between his body layer and his arm layers so that the body appears behind the desk and the arms in front.
any idea on how to achieve this?   I can probably sandwich it in the characters hierarchy but then when I move the character off screen the desk will go with him.