Don’t Let Your Former Spouse Come Back for More
Video Transcribed: Hello everybody, my name is Dustin Peterson and I am the Oklahoma City Attorney. We’ve been talking about equitable property distribution and most recently we discussed a couple of ways in which pension plan benefits can be dispersed here in Oklahoma.
But what if in the divorce, instead of you collecting the pension benefits and then distributing whatever portion is owed to your former spouse, what if you would like those benefits dispersed to your former spouse directly from the pension plan? This can be accomplished through a qualified domestic relations order or what we call a quadro.
In the quadro, we submit this order to the judge. We also have to get the pension plan administrator’s approval. And once entered, it can do exactly that. There are a couple of pitfalls to be aware of.
Sometimes in divorce, one spouse, the non-employee spouse, may waive their right to pension plan benefits for some other compensation. It doesn’t really matter, but that can be arranged. And sometimes that happens and it ends up in the divorce decree that they have waived their right to your pension plan benefits.
You must be careful, especially if you have an ERISA pension plan, which is the Employee Retirement Income Security Act. If you have an ERISA pension plan, you must make sure that the waiver is accomplished on plan-provided documents. If it’s in the decree, even though that is a court order, that will not be sufficient and your former spouse could still come back and claim pension plan benefits, even though he or she may have waived them in the divorce decree.
If you have any questions about the quadro or pension plan benefits, contact me, a divorce lawyer in OKC, at my office at 405-888-5400 or look me up online at theoklahomacityattorney.com.
