Samaroo v. Samaroo, 98-5245
| Citation | 193 F.3d 185 |
| Decision Date | 27 April 1999 |
| Docket Number | No. 98-5245,98-5245 |
| Parties | (3rd Cir. 1999) LOUISE ROBICHAUD SAMAROO, v. WINSTON R. SAMAROO, AT&T MANAGEMENT PENSION PLAN, v. LOUISE M. ROBICHAUD, LOUISE M. ROBICHAUD. APPELLANT Argued: |
| Court | United States Courts of Appeals. United States Court of Appeals (3rd Circuit) |
On Appeal from the United States District Court for the District of New Jersey (D. C. Civil Nos. 89-2215 and 89-2216) District Judge: Garrett E. Brown, Jr.
Louise M. Robichaud (argued) Kingston, NJ 08528 Pro Se Appellant
Christopher H. Mills (argued) Somerset, NJ 08873 Attorney for Appellee
OPINION OF THE COURT
Louise Robichaud appeals the district court's1 entry of summary judgment against her on AT&T Management Pension Plan's complaint for declaratory relief. The Plan sought a declaration that Robichaud was not entitled to pre-retirement survivor's annuity benefits of her former husband, Winston Samaroo, who died while still actively employed by AT&T Technologies. Although the Samaroo-Robichaud divorce decree did not state that Robichaud should receive benefits under Samaroo's pre-retirement survivor's annuity, after Samaroo's death Robichaud obtained a nunc pro tunc amendment to the divorce decree purportedly creating such an entitlement. The district court held that the amended order was not a qualified domestic relations order capable of conferring on Robichaud the benefits she seeks. We affirm.
Robichaud and Samaroo were divorced on October 25, 1984, by the New Jersey Superior Court, Chancery Division. The divorce decree incorporated a property settlement reached by the parties which had the following language concerning Robichaud's rights in Samaroo's pension benefits:
Neither the decree nor the property settlement mentions any rights to Samaroo's survivor's annuity.
Samaroo died at the age of 53 on September 20, 1987, about three years after the divorce, while still actively employed by AT&T. He was covered under the AT&T Management Pension Plan, a defined benefit plan which provided pensions and survivors' annuities in amounts based on a percentage of the employee's average salary times years of service. Based on Samaroo's age and years of service, he had a vested right to a deferred vested pension, which would have begun, at the earliest, at age 55. Because Samaroo did not live to the age to qualify to receive pension payments, there were, strictly speaking, no pension benefits that ever became payable in respect of Samaroo. Therefore, the benefit expressly mentioned in the divorce settlement agreement never came to fruition.
However, the Plan provides a pre-retirement survivor annuity available to the surviving spouse of any Plan participant who died after vesting but before retiring. If there is no surviving spouse, there is no annuity.
Under the Employee Retirement Income Security Act of 1974 as it existed at the time of the Samaroo-Robichaud divorce, it was unclear whether state divorce decrees could effectively convey a share in one spouse's pension benefits to the other spouse. See generally Dial v. NFL Player Supplemental Disability Plan, 174 F.3d 606, 610 (5th Cir. 1999); ABA Section of Labor and Employment Law, Employee Benefits Law 171-72 (1991). The Retirement Equity Act of 1984, Pub. L. No. 98-397, enacted in August 1984 and effective January 1, 1985, amended ERISA to provide that pension benefits may be alienated by means of a Qualified Domestic Relations Order (known as a QDRO), 29 U.S.C. § 1056(d)(3)(A) (1994). Although the Retirement Equity Act was not in effect on October 25, 1984, the date of the Samaroo-Robichaud divorce, plan administrators may, in their discretion, treat orders entered before the date of the Act as QDROs. S. Rep. No. 98-575, at 23 (1984), reprinted in 1984 U.S.S.C.A.N. 2547, 2569.
The Plan denied Robichaud's claim for a pre-retirement survivor's annuity because the divorce decree did not mention any entitlement to such rights, and in the absence of a surviving spouse or a QDRO designating a former spouse as such, there was simply no pre-retirement survivor's annuity payable in respect of Samaroo.2 Robichaud filed a motion in the New Jersey Superior Court, Chancery Division, to amend the Final Judgment of Divorce nunc pro tunc to convey to her a right to fifty percent of the preretirement survivor's annuity payable in respect of Samaroo. Samaroo v. Samaroo, 743 F. Supp. 309, 311 (D.N.J. 1990). Robichaud joined the Plan as a defendant in the divorce case. Id. The Plan removed the action to federal court and also filed a complaint for declaratory relief in the same court. Id. The two cases were consolidated. The district court remanded that portion of the removed case that involved the terms of the divorce, but retained jurisdiction of Robichaud's claim against the Plan for the retirement benefits. Id. at 317.
After a hearing, the New Jersey state court held that the Plan did not have standing to object to alteration of the divorce decree. Winston Samaroo's estate did not oppose Robichaud's request to amend the decree nunc pro tunc, since conveying the survivorship rights once Samaroo was dead did not cost the estate anything, but undid the effect of Samaroo dying without a survivor. The attorney who drafted the agreement testified that the issue of survivor's benefits never came up at the time of the agreement:
Robichaud herself testified that "neither Winston [nor his attorney] or I thought about the survivor rights to this pension." Based on the evidence that the divorce was amicable, the state court amended the divorce decree retroactively to give Robichaud "rights of survivorship to 50% of [Samaroo's] vested pension benefits." The court stated, however, that whether or not the state court order resulted in any benefits becoming payable to Robichaud under the Plan was a question of federal law over which the federal court had retained jurisdiction and which would have to be resolved by the federal court.
After the state court's ruling, Robichaud and the Plan filed cross motions for summary judgment in the pending federal district court action. The district court examined the statutory requirements for a QDRO under 29 U.S.C. § 1056(d)(3)(C) and(D). The court held that the amended divorce order satisfied the specificity requirements of section 1056(d)(3)(C), but not the substantive requirements of section 1056(d)(3)(D). Under that section a domestic relations order is not a QDRO if it requires the plan to provide any type of benefits not otherwise provided by the plan or to provide increased benefits. 29 U.S.C. § 1056(d)(3)(D)(i) and (ii). The court relied on the reasoning of Hopkins v. AT&T Global Information Solutions Co., 105 F.3d 153, 156 (4th Cir. 1997), to conclude that entitlement to a survivor's annuity in respect of Samaroo had to be determined as of the day Samaroo died, and that the amended divorce decree represented an attempt to obtain increased benefits from the Plan. The court therefore entered summary judgment for the Plan and against Robichaud. Robichaud appeals.
We review a grant of summary judgment de novo, using the same standard the district court must use: summary judgment is proper only if there are no genuine issues of material fact and the moving party is entitled to judgment as a matter of law. Fed. R. Civ. P. 56(c); Hullett v. Towers, Perrin, Forster & Crosby, Inc., 38 F.3d 107, 111 (3d Cir. 1994).
The district court stated that it would review the Plan's denial of Robichaud's claim under the arbitrary and capricious standard of review appropriate when, as here, a benefit plan gives the plan administrator discretionary authority to construe the terms of the plan. See Firestone Tire and Rubber Co. v. Bruch, 489 U.S. 101, 115 (1989). 29 U.S.C. § 1056(d)(3)(G)(i)(II) requires the plan administrator to make the initial determination of whether an order is a QDRO. However, we conclude that the issue in this case is a question of statutory construction regarding the requisites of a QDRO, rather than a question of interpretation of the Plan. Cf. Hullett, 38 F.3d at 114 (). The deferential standard of review of a plan interpretation "is appropriate only when the trust instrument allows the trustee to interpret the instrument and when the trustee has in fact interpreted the instrument." Moench v. Robertson, 62 F.3d 553, 567 (3d Cir. 1995) (emphasis in original) (internal quotation omitted), cert. denied, 516 U.S. 1115 (1996). In this case, there is no dispute about the interpretation of the Plan, but only about whether the nunc pro tunc order qualifies as a QDRO under federal law. We must review legal Conclusions and questions of statutory construction de novo. See Dial v. NFL Player Supplemental Disability Plan, 174 F.3d 606, 611 (5th Cir. 1999) ().
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