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Bait and switch Great news! The price of a Mercedes has been slashed. Oh, and by the way, those Chevys that you all drive now will cost you five times as much.

Would you expect anything else from this administration?

You may want to start your review with the 2001 U.S. Supreme Court case of Egelhoff v. Egelhoff (121 S. Ct. 1322) and the 2009 U.S. Supreme Court case of Kennedy v. Plan Administrator for DuPont Savings and Investment Plan (129 S. Ct. 865) generally holding that death benefits under an ERISA plan are payable only in accordance with its terms. I add that I have seen disclaimers used after death to allow a different person to receive aN ERISA plan death benefit, but likely would not be useful in this instance. Under a disclaimer, the designated beneficiary disclaims his or her right to receive the death benefit. The effect of a disclaimer is that the beneficiary will be treated as dying before the participant, and the resulting beneficiary determined in accordance with the applicable plan terms. A disclaimer cannot designate a beneficiary for the death benefit or otherwise direct its payment.

The statute calls for a plan to "establish reasonable procedures to determine the qualified status of domestic relations orders and to administer distributions under such qualified orders". Some practitioners interpret the reasonable procedure part of the statute to mean that the procedures can be more liberal than the statute as long as they are reasonable. In other words a procedure that requires more than the receipt of a DRO is not reasonable, but it could be reasonable to allow a something more liberal like "notification of pending DRO". While I agree that the procedure should follow the statute, I have read very few (if any) that are that narrowly tailored. Chances are good that the procedures in question allow for something more liberal than actual receipt of the DRO, and in that case the procedure should be followed. Ignoring the procedures (even if they are questionable) could also open the door to a fiduciary breach claim.