Leaderboard

You are correct about the shared employees have to be covered. The rest of your questions depend on the business arrangement. How many of the doctors are incorporated? and and who owns what? They probably don't want to pay an ERISA attorney to sort this out. but they probably should. The affiliated service group rules can be really tough to get through.

With respect to the qualification of the domestic relations order, it is a discussion of what is right and wrong and a discussion of what is practical and what is not. It is so impractical to disqualify for the reason you suggest that it is wrong legally as well. A very recent court case likened the qualificatiion process as going through a checklist. I think it was an oversimplification, but the court made the point that if all items for qualification were properly in the order and no items in the order were forbidden by the applicable rules, the plan administrator should determine the order to be qualified. Can you point to anything in section 414(p) that suggests that if the order does not specify the name of the plan administrator correctly that it fails to qualify? I am sorry to say that because the other players are ignorant and the court does not care, you will probably get away with disqualification and another order will have to be issued, causing additional delay and expense. By the way, since you are neither a lawyer nor a fiduciary, how is it that you are determining or advising about whether or not a domestic relations order is qualified?

Is Key Man insurance something relevant to a pension plan? I had thought that Key Man insurance is there to protect the sponsor in the event an irreplaceable employee were to die. Why handle that in the pension plan?

To get more specific on the rollover vs transfers here is the difference: 1) Did the participants of the MPP complete distribution forms and have the choice to take the money, roll to an IRA or roll to the PSP? or 2) Was the money transfered by the trustee from the MPP to the PSP? Depending on which one of those happened will drive how you answer your original question.