PENSIONS – QDRO IMPLEMENTATION, INTERPRETATION – SEPARATION AGREEMENTS – INTERPRETATION – OPM/CIVIL SERVICE POLICIES FRUSTRATING PARTY INTENT – REMEDIES – COURTS’ AUTHORITY. A court has jurisdiction to modify its divorce judgment to effect a workable division of a pension by QDRO under §20-107.3(K)(4), and that includes separation agreement cases, and it includes construing the intended meaning of the contractual clauses, the Court of Appeals points out in Craig v. Craig, 59 Va. App. 527, 721 S.E.2d 24 (2/7/12). But it does not include adding to or changing the contract because of changing circumstances or any other reason, the Court explains, and that distinction provided the subject of the husband-wife dispute wherein the trial court had heard her parol evidence, given the wife what she wanted and awarded her fees, and husband appealed. This was one of those agreements that provided for the wife getting a survivor benefit plan on top of her pension percentage, but called for deducting the SBP premium from her share. OPM, however, construed its regulations to deduct the $810 premium twice, first from his share and then from hers. This odd interpretation disadvantaged wife. Husband said that sounded fine to him. The first question was whether the question posed even fit within subsection (K)(4), because if not, the trial court did not even have jurisdiction to make any interpretations of the contract, much less modify it. Interestingly, both sides argued that the contract was unambiguous – so why wasn’t that end of story? Well, because even in that situation the courts can still resolve questions of application intent, the Court of Appeals explains, when an unforeseen and illogical interpretation comes along that would nevertheless be totally inconsistent with the obvious intent, and one party nevertheless says he (now) agrees with it. Somebody has to be there to say what’s right and what isn’t. The court concluded that at the time of formation, both parties intended the use of words (like “gross amount”) in their ordinary sense, rather than the weird one that CSRS/OPM under its own regulations was applying. The Court of Appeals quotes from a previous and almost identical case called Recker v. Recker, 48 Va. App. 188, 629 S.E.2d 191 (2006), 26/2 FLN 31, which involved this kind of off-the-wall interpretation. It went through the ordinary and dictionary meanings of the word “gross,” and said that the ordinary meaning is the one these parties clearly intended. Husband tried an ingenuous attempt to distinguish Recker, pointing out that that consent decree did not specifically mention CSRS (which this one did), but referred to husband’s “specific branch of the Federal Government Retirement & Disability System.” The Court of Appeals responded that “in order to accept husband’s position, we must conclude that wife agreed to have the survivor annuity costs ($810) deducted twice from her share.” It concluded, based on the clear language of the agreement, that the parties intended that the $810 should be deducted only once. This kind of interpretation and modification is authorized by §20-107.3(K)(4), because it modifies a QDRO in order to “conform its terms so as to effectuate the expressed intent of the Order, and does so consistently with the substantive provisions of the original decree.” The Court reiterates that it can’t do this just because of change of circumstances. The Court also rules that it was all right to accept parol evidence from the wife, even to construe an unambiguous agreement. It’s true that parol evidence is inadmissible to contradict, add to or even explain the terms of a complete and unambiguous written agreement, but the Court of Appeals notes that wife’s testimony here did not attempt to alter the terms, but merely stated them in her testimony. The fee award was reversed, because the husband’s contentions were not frivolous and he relied in part on Court of Appeals cases that had caused the scratching of not a few heads at the time, such as Duva v. Duva, 55 Va. App. 286, 685 S.E.2d 842 (2009). The West’s Headnote Number 14 to this case makes the especially helpful observation that the purpose of subsection (K)(4) in giving trial courts continuing jurisdiction to modify “is to protect the interests of pension recipients from the unintended consequences of improperly or incomplete [sic] drafted pension orders.” While the text paragraphs signaled with numbers 13 and 14 did not exactly use these words as the Court of Appeals’s own, they do quote our Family Law Section’s Report on pension division in divorce proceedings from 1991, House Document No. 19, which says this. And although those nice words don’t exactly fit what was done in the Craig case, they are themselves embodied in the appellate court’s quotation from a previous opinion called Irwin v. Irwin, 47 Va. App. 287, 623 S.E.2d 438 (2005), to the effect that the statutory reservation allows a court to revise its orders to comply with the language required by federal law to effectuate the intended pension award. And while that doesn’t necessarily hit the Craig case mark either, it’s helpful to have these additional prongs of statutory authority explained.