Surviving spouse rollover

[Guest Steve Palmer]

Desingnated beneficiary spouse was age 55 at time of husband's death only a couple of months after his required beginning date. Rather than rollover to her own and begin SEPP, she opted to receive "death" distributions based on her single life expectancy, recalculated. Now that she is age 60 she wants to make it her own. Is there an exception to the "end of the year following death" for making the decision to make it her own?

Edit posted 2/8/00:

It looks like it is not a matter of end of year following death, but the fact that the surviving spouse may have made an irrevocable election NOT to treat the IRA as her own when she took a death distribution. PLR 9608042 seems to support a strict interpretation of this positon. As Natale Choate says in her book "Life and Death Planning for Retirement Benefits", page 120, the only people hurt by this ruling are poor young widows. Any ideas out there for a way around this? Think a PLR request would be worthwhile?

[This message has been edited by Steve Palmer (edited 02-08-2000).]