I am curious about distributions to Alternate Payees under a QDRO. Do most 401(k) Plans allow Alternate Payees to withdraw money they have been assigned under a QDRO even if no "distributable event" has occurred? It has been our practice to NOT allow an Alternate Payee to withdraw their money until the participant they were assigned money from retires, dies, separates from service, etc. However, we hear that others routinely allow Alternate Payees to withdraw their money. If this is true, what is the regulatory basis for this? Does the Plan document have to be amended to specifically allow for this? Thank you.

We make distributions to alternate payees under QDROs. In order to do this we amended the plans on the advice of council.

You must check your plan document. The prototype we use has a provision allowing the payment to an alternate payee once an order has been qualified. Therefore, paying a QDRO is straight forward for our clients on the prototype. Other clients have individually drafted documents with no such provision. In this instance, a distribution is not made until a distributable event occurs.

Thanks for the replies. We use individually-drafted Plan documents that are silent on this issue. That is why we were curious about where in the regs it says this can be done, so we could figure out what Plan document wording, if any, had to be added to make this happen.

See Treas. Reg. 1.401(a)-13(g)(3) for a provision that allows distributions to alternate payees pursuant to QDROs even if there is no other distributable event.