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Hello All, I find myself in a difficult position with requesting a hardship withdrawal from the 401k account I have through my employer. The reason for the withdrawal is medical, but I'm reluctant to provide documentation due to the sensitive nature of the expenses. I am a cancer survivor, and part of my treatment involved the use of strong opiates to deal with pain. While the cancer seems to be defeated (at least for now), the opiate addiction isn't. While these are legally prescribed opiates, they are clearly having a negative impact on my personal and professional life, but I find myself unable to quit on my own. My doctor has recommended that I check in to an in-patient rehabilitation clinic for opiate addiction. Such a facility, however, is very expensive, and is not fully covered by my medical insurance (my responsibility could be anywhere from 10k to 50k, depending on a variety of factors - my retirement funds can comfortably cover even the largest estimate, so I can "afford" it in that regard). Due to various other medical and personal expenses, I have already leveraged my loans and non-hardship withdrawal - this is my only remaining option. For obvious reasons, I do not want to inform my employer that I am attending an in-patient rehabilitation clinic for drug addiction. My plan seems to require that I submit documentation detailing the costs, but I feel that doing so would jeopardize my continued employment or impact my career negatively in other aspects (regardless of whether or not it is legal or proper for them to do so, I find it likely that this will occur due to the nature of my industry). What can I do to provide the requested data without revealing that it is related to drug addiction? Is it a crime to falsify this data by altering the bills to make it look as though it's for a different medical expense? What other recourse do I have? I'm desperate to get clean before it ruins my career, marriage, and life, but revealing this information may well do that anyway. I feel hopeless and trapped - is there anything I can do? Thank you in advance for any information or advice you can provide.

401(k) participant whose account included after-tax and pre-tax dollars received an otherwise-proper hardship distribution (i.e., authorized by plan, procedures followed, right amount was paid, etc.), but which was paid entirely out of pre-tax deferrals (i.e., the distribution was paid without regard to the ordering rule requiring it to have been paid first out of after-tax dollars). To pluck some numbers out of thin air, let's say that a $10,000 hardship distribution was paid entirely out of pre-tax dollars, rather than $1,000 after-tax (representing the full after-tax account balance) and $9,000 pre-tax. As a result, the administrator treated the entire $10,000 distribution as taxable and subject to the 10% early withdrawal penalty. But if the first $1,000 had properly come out of the after-tax account, the amount of P's basis in the after-tax account shouldn't have been reduced. So the plan isn't out any money, but the tax hit to the participant was a bit larger than it should have been. To me, it seems reasonable under the general correction principles to fix this by cutting P a check for the amount of the improper tax hit (plus interest), and moving the remaining after-tax dollars into P's pre-tax account. But EPCRS doesn't seem to directly address this scenario. Anyone encountered this before? Thoughts? E: I suppose one might argue that this is, really, a failure to have initially required P to withdraw the after-tax amounts before receiving the hardship, which could be corrected by requiring repayment of the portion that shouldn't have been distributed in the first place. But from the plan's perspective, the right amount (in absolute terms, anyway) was paid out. Any repayment would presumably be made with after-tax money anyway, so requiring that additional steps seems like an overly complex means of reaching the same result you'd get by recharacterizing the remaining after-tax dollars already in the plan as pre-tax...