This report recommends amendments to the Matrimonial Property Act to improve the division of the benefits of a pension plan upon marriage breakdown. It covers all pension plans that fall under provincial jurisdiction or that can be reached by Alberta court orders. Recommendations are designed to achieve fairness, minimize the future entanglement of spouses’ financial affairs, encourage settlements, minimize financial and emotional costs, and protect the interests of the employers and other employees in pension plans and pension funds. Current methods of dividing pension benefits are valuation and accounting, and division of proceeds by the employee spouse, which would continue. New methods of division proposed are valuation and division, provision of a separate pension, and division of proceeds by the pension plan administrator. A preferential order would be established directing the court to begin with valuation and accounting unless it would cause a result that would not be just and equitable. In such circumstances, the court would be directed to the next method unless the result would not be just and equitable, and so on. The report recommends that a pension benefit be valued as if the employee had terminated his employment at the time of the division of the matrimonial property. The adoption of a method of valuation under which regulations would establish annually the assumptions necessary for valuing deferred annuities. Pension plan administrators would provide the actual valuations, thus doing away with the necessity for costly and lengthy court battles over valuation.
Final Report
Back to Publication SearchMatrimonial Property: Division of Pension Benefits Upon Marriage Breakdown, Final Report 48
Resource Details
Publication No: | 48 |
FORMAT: | Publications |
TAGS: | husband, wife, value, divorce, matrimonial, pension, Property, settlement, spouse |
FILE: | fr048.pdf |