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Good morning and greetings from the Wild Wild West! Update: Our participant was able to get a judge to sign and bless his home-made DRO into QDRO status yesterday. Tomorrow he is bringing it in person to me and will also sign his own distribution form for his distribution of his half of the account and leave it with me so that I can process his distribution just as quickly as his ex-wife's portion is removed from the account and set up under her name, still under the plan. She can then respond to the forms to get her part out of the plan at her leisure and it won't impede him. I surely didn't set out to start a controversial thread but I am really glad it happened because we see that not even the experts all agree with each other and not everyone has the same approach or the same procedure. We are still learning from this thread. Thank you to everyone who participated and is still participating.

I would give notice to all parties that a DRO has been received and will be reviewed to determine qualified status. 100% agree. This is fairly easily distinguishable from simply knowing that P is going through a divorce, and that QDRO may or may not be issued at its conclusion. AP is not the ONLY* party with rights that should be protected. *Edited for clarity. I somehow left out the only in my last sentence. Of course AP also has rights that need protecting.

We spent most of today archiving old files and packing away boxes, so I can't do any of you justice at the moment. @Larry, Starr your latest post helps immensely and I will answer it as soon as I can. @ fmsinc, I didn't get to read the whole memo yet but the chicken soup story was great! @david rigby, thank you. @BobbyV, yes they do. Have a great weekend, everyone!

As a Moderator, I'll take this opportunity to comment about a previous post/exchange in this thread. Let's keep our discussions civil. Please. You know who you are. There is no value here in using demeaning words or phrasing.

Idr - this has been one of the most informative and, frankly, the most fascinating thread I've seen on this forum (though I am relatively new). I really do hope you choose to stay in the forum and not leave it as you stated you were thinking of doing early on. So many questioners might not have hung in there when initially feeling quite disappointed. I seldom see the original questioner continue to be so engaged in the process, thus making this thread a great resource for others to find in their future electronic searches for information about the QDRO process and the twists and turns inherent with the topic. Bravo to you (and to all those who contributed).

@QDROphile: On the whole, the outcome so far was extremely positive and came the closest to satisfying absolutely everyone concerned. Yesterday we sent the participant the John Hancock withdrawal form for himself as a terminated participant, the Special Tax Notice, AND the boiler plate QDRO document that our ERISA attorney allows us to share in special cases. He called back today with a few questions on how to fill out the form, and then he was off to court to see what he needed to do to get this thing blessed by a judge and turned into a QDRO. He finally understands the tax consequences of merely taking a distribution of the entire account first and he wants to avoid that if he can. It remains to be seen whether he can get a judge to approve the DRO in the time frame that he needs. He's not trying to escape paying the ex-wife. At the moment, everyone is satisfied. The client and we as the TPA are not worried about being sued by the ex-wife. The ex-wife, who, as it develops, has been bugging the participant about getting her share, now knows that there is movement on her case and it should be resolved soon. The HR department at the client's office knows that we've done our dead level best to take care of both them and the participant and the ex-wife and that's what they wanted. The participant "gets it" about his taxes and has opted to try to do the QDRO. He knows he can always default to taking all the money and paying all the taxes if absolutely necessary due to time constraints. I appreciate the professionals who replied yesterday and I respect their expertise and advice, even if I don't agree with all of them. My one exception is you. You may have had some good ideas, but you delivered them with so much venom and sarcasm that the effort to "help" was lost. If you enjoyed belittling me and my efforts yesterday, then I hope you had fun. You won't get another opportunity. As for the accuracy, there were only two points with which I do not agree. First, the notion that we have no responsibility to do anything at all until we receive a genuine DRO does not play here. Our client expects us to listen, care, and take action of some sort when she alerts us to the fact that there something in the works with a divorce. Our ERISA attorney said it was "probably prudent" to freeze the account until it could be sorted out. We have stopped kicking ourselves for doing that, and we will assess each case individually and make our best decision in the future as to whether to do that or not. Yes, many of our employers are paternalistic and with good reason. We have no quarrel with that. Plus, our clients, and we, do not want to go to court over an ex-spouse's claim to a benefit that we approved to be paid out to a participant. It really does not matter that we would have technically been "right" because we did not receive a DRO or a QDRO. We would still have to spend the money, hire a lawyer, and use valuable time to go win the case. The other point with which I disagree is that "jerking John Hancock's chain" brought down some kind of adverse circumstance. It did not, and there is no problem there. And that is all I have to say on this subject, except that I will update the thread when I find out the ultimate outcome of the situation.

I agree with ldr here. I don't mind a certain bluntness in answers, I am also very thick skinned so my blunt could be another person's rude. However, I try do make sure initial answers are not rude. It is for the reason I think people should be encouraged to answer. Even if you give a wrong answer you ought to be encourage to give an answer. You should learn from the other answers if you are wrong but that is really the only way to learn here. I know for a fact you can search my answers over the years where I have gone back and edited my answer to say something to the effect: I have edited my answer to nothing as I have been shown to be wrong in my first answer. Sorry for the confusion I may have caused. That should be good enough and encouraged. That is how everyone learns. And in the case of this forum the number of truly dumb questions is very small. So all questions ought to be encourage to be asked.

RatherBeGolfing, right now I'd rather be golfing too and I don't even play! Seriously, we are a tiny, tiny shop. We don't have the luxury of sending something down the hall to the correct "department". Like it or not, ready or not, 100% up to speed or not, we have handle everything our clients throw at us. Occasionally, the scornful, snide responses we get on this forum make us feel like the rest of the pension world works in a 50 story building with a "distribution floor", a "QDRO floor", a "loan floor", etc. where each floor has 25-30 minions running around at the behest of the department head, etc. We do all the normal things that responsible, caring people do. We attend the ASPPA convention and take ASPPA credentialed courses. We read Sal's Bible faithfully. We bounce things off each other, call former colleagues, Google things, and look things up in the Answer Books put out by Aspen Publishers. We consult the ERISA attorney on call if necessary, but first, we have to know that it is necessary! It's a simple fact that no one human being (except maybe Sal Tripodi) has ALL of the knowledge about ALL of the topics in his brain and at his fingertips. We would like to be able to ask questions on here without coming under attack for what we don't know. After all, if we knew, and we knew that we knew, we wouldn't need this forum, would we? I do honestly believe that our tiny band gives it their all, every day, to do the best job they can for the clients and the participants with the tools and the information we have. QDROs come up maybe 4-5 times a year. As such, reviewing them is a negligible part of our overall duties.None of us have ever been presented with a case that was not attached to a DRO or a QDRO. This was something new, something we did not know could happen since we had never seen it before. We acted in good faith as we knew it at the time. The HR department of the client sent the marital settlement agreement because they thought it was important. We all were under the impression that once you knew, no matter how you knew, that an alternate payee had a right to part of a participant's account, the account was supposed to be frozen lest the participant run off with the alternate payee's balance. We now know better, but that doesn't make us stupid, ignorant, or bad administrators. We are darned good administrators who seldom process QDROs and never pretended to be attorneys. All this is to say that it's time to give anyone who asks a question on here the benefit of the doubt. They are at least TRYING. If they didn't care they wouldn't ask questions in the first place. Why not try to foster an environment where anyone from rookies to old fogies can ask questions without fear of repercussions?