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Curious as to how it was discovered that the participant was no longer married? Is it possible to look up the participant's divorce action to see whether or not any domestic relations order or marital support order was entered? I think it is entirely possible that the participant thought electing a QJSA is what he was required to do because he and his former spouse agreed they'd split his benefit or at least that's what the former spouse's attorney will claim!

I wanted to also add that mandatory HSA contributions could be administratively problematic for the employer since there's a dollar limit on the HSA contributions. Personal example: as part of my benefits package, my employer contributes up to the HSA limit for family coverage. My spouse who is not covered by my employer, but his own employer's coverage, signed up for an HSA and "unknowingly" received a minimal contribution to his HSA account (-he didn't bother to read the fine print). It was a pain trying to correct the overage.

Thank you everyone for your comments! Based on what I've found so far, it seems as though the practitioners advertising this possibility are stretching what may be considered "domestic relations law" and the orders may not necessarily be coming from a domestic law division court.

This is the first time that I've seen this- a DC participant submitted a "DRO" in which a six figure sum of his DC account will be transferred to his spouse. Participant and spouse are married, not seeking a dissolution of marriage and as far as we know, it is not intended for spousal support. A quick Google search shows that there are some practitioners promoting in marriage qdros as a means of gaining access to pension or DC funds (likely without those pesky plan terms getting in the way). I'm just scratching the surface of my review, but it's hard for me to imagine that this was never tried in the past 30 some years. I seem to recall that there might have been cases of fake divorces just so people could access their pension accounts- why bother going through a fake divorce if you could simply claim a marital property transfer??? I'm curious as to what other people have seen/think of these?