New York Divorce Report - New York's Divorce and Family Law Blog

Much has ado has been made of the pilots being sued by Continental Airlines because they divorced in order to get partial distributions of their pensions. As reported in Freakonomics:

Continental Airlines is suing nine of its pilots, reports ABC News, claiming they faked divorces in order to draw down their pension funds before retirement. The airline became suspicious when some of the couples continued living together and all nine couples eventually reunited. Continental believes the pilots became worried about the safety of their pension funds, especially after seeing what’s happening at other airlines.

The airline claims that the divorces were shams. The couples all continued to live together and most did not even tell their friends and family about the divorces.

On the other hand, the parties were legally divorced. By getting divorced, even temporarily, they lost the rights afforded married couples, like for instance, the right to continued health coverage. If their tax year ended while they were divorced, the parties could not file joint tax returns.

In fact, the Continental Airline employees gambled that after making generous settlements, their spouses would re-marry them. Indeed, the parties would be hard-pressed to complain that the divorce settlement should be set aside because it was procured by their joint “fraud.”

Many marriage and divorce decisions are economically motivated. Some couples wed to obtain healthcare coverage. Others refrain from marriage to protect their social security status. Still others divorce as part of an elder care plan.

What these Continental employees did was lawful; the employer should not have the right to question the legitimacy of the employees’ marriage or divorce.
 

The Court of Appeals, New York’s highest court announced in a pair of cases that marital funds which were used to pay the separate obligations of one of the parties during the marriage could not be recouped in the divorce. This is a far reaching decision because, for instance, a second wife cannot now recover from her husband marital funds used to pay his first wife spousal maintenance or child support.

In short, the divorce court should only consider the assets and liabilities existing at the time of the divorce.

The Court in Mahoney-Buntzman v. Buntzman declared that:

Courts should not second-guess the economic decisions made during the course of a marriage, but rather should equitably distribute the assets and obligations remaining once the relationship is at an end.

The Court recognized that if a trial court were to scrutinize every transaction during the marriage, the result would be a cumbersome review by a court, forced to review the reasonableness of every expenditure, measuring the benefit to each of the parties. Instead, the Court declared that “The parties’ choice of how to spend funds during the course of the marriage should ordinarily be respected.”

This same conclusion was reached in Johnson v. Chapin, decided the same day.

In reaching this conclusion, the Court noted that:

There may be circumstances where equity requires a credit to one spouse for marital property used to pay off the separate debt of one spouse or add to the value of one spouse's separate property . . .Further, to the extent that expenditures are truly excessive, the ability of one party to claim that the other has accomplished a "wasteful dissipation of assets" (DRL 236 [B][5][d][11]) by his or her expenditures provides protection.

In other words, questionable or wasteful expenditures may be examined, child support and maintenance payments may not.