(Bloomberg) -- A profit center. A silent fee. One more kick inthe pants.

Those are a few of the ways divorce lawyers describe the feethat many 401(k) plan participants have to pay when theyneed to divide a retirement account in a divorce. As more wealth accumulates indefined-contribution plans and divorcing baby boomers move tosplit it up, more retirement savers are getting to know a littleabbreviation that packs a big punch in frustration andexasperation.

QDRO.

The fee is for processing a qualified domestic relationsorder to transfer assets in a defined-contribution account.Some employers don't charge separately for the QDRO—the feemay be built into the plan's costs and, ultimately, spread acrossall your colleagues.

But when a third party such as Fidelity Investments or VanguardGroup handles the administrative and record-keeping details of a401(k) plan, the QDRO fee charged to participants can start around$300, jump quickly to about $700, and stretchto $1,200 and beyond. That's on top of what you're payingthe lawyer who prepared the form for the plan to approve andprocess.

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One way record keepers can "enhance profit margins, whileremaining competitive on record-keeping charges, is to chargebloated transaction fees to participants," said Carl Engstrom, anattorney with Nichols Kaster, which has filed excessive-feelawsuits against plan sponsors, the companies offering the 401(k)to employees. "While QDRO processing fees may seem like an oddballor niche issue, this problem raises issues that echo many of thesame themes that we keep hearing in recent 401(k) litigation."

Plan sponsors can wind up in the legal cross-hairs for allegedlybreaching a fiduciary duty by not negotiating for lower fees. Thelitigation has focused mostly on investment fees and overallrecord-keeping costs, not on items like QDRO fees.

QDROs are "like a cash-printing machine for planadministrators," said Emily McBurney, an Atlanta-based lawyer whohas specialized in QDROs for 16 years. Plans can essentiallycharge whatever they want, she said, and "no one can go up againstthe big record-keepers to say that the amount is not reasonable, sopeople are trapped."

There are tangled agendas here. Class-action lawyers maysmell a potential suit alleging excessive transaction fees. Divorcelawyers say the Fidelitys of the 401(k)world are overly rigid in the language and format theyrequire.

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Third-party QDRO experts, the attorneys' competitors at times,say many lawyers don't know the ins and outs of the lawssurrounding tax-advantaged retirement benefits and QDROs.

And when a plan administrator gets a QDRO that doesn't have theright language, it goes right back to the lawyers.

Guess who pays for their time.

A QDRO fee of $500 to $1,000 is reasonable, said StephenMcCaffrey, chairman of the legal and legislative committee for thePlan Sponsor Council of America. He cites the administrativecomplexities of QDROs, which fall under the Employee RetirementIncome Security Act of 1974. In a 2015 survey by Aon Hewitt of 367plan sponsors, the percentage saying participants were directlycharged a QDRO transaction fee was 55 percent in 2015, up from25 percent in 2009.

McCaffrey said divorce lawyers "rail against this because theydon't have a clue about what needs to be done and the time ittakes to do it. I suspect it's not a profit center for the bigrecord keepers."

Most attorneys aren't even aware of the fee, McBurney said."When clients are hit with an unexpected $1,000 fee from, say,Schwab, without warning—when they often already owe the attorneythousands of dollars from the divorce—they get mad," she said. Iffees go up after a QDRO is rejected because the lawyer didn'thandle it right, it makes the lawyer look bad—or, "more accurately,worse," she said.

Bill Burns of Lexington Pension Consultants, a longtimeQDRO and pension valuation expert, said most companies heworks with don't charge plan participants a QDRO fee. "It'sprimarily the bigger third-party administrators, and they chargemore than we do in the first place," he said. "That's how they maketheir money."

Lexington acts as a middleman between lawyers and planadministrators. These days, more employers are signing contractsfor QDROs with companies such as Fidelity, a trend that can cutinto Lexington's business, said Burns.

Fidelity hasn't changed its fees in a long time—15 years. That'sin contrast to many other plan investment fees and expenses, whichhave declined over the years amid complaints and lawsuits fromconsumers and lawyers.

If a participant uses Fidelity's model form and all goessmoothly, it charges $300. For orders not generated onits site and for a Fidelity-generated order that "is alteredor does not contain the unique Tracking Number as originallyprinted on the Order," as its QDRO site puts it, it's $1,200. If anorder isn't generated on Fidelity's site and involves multipleretirement accounts with the same company,it's $1,800.

Fidelity said it doesn't have data on competitive fees and hasnot heard "negative feedback from the consulting community" when itpitches new business that includes information on QDRO fees.

Vanguard charges around $700, and Schwab typically chargesbetween $750 and $1,000. The 2015 Aon Hewitt found an averagecharge (including plans with no QDRO charge) of $398, with amedian of $350.

That's about what Buddy Horner, director of retirement planconsulting for Bronfman E.L. Rothschild, which works with smallerretirement plans, said his firm charges—a flat $350 and anadditional hourly rate if it takes longer than two or three hours.Scott Trout, managing partner at Cordell & Cordell, whichspecializes in family law, said "lawyers do the heavy liftingin drafting the QDRO," something that typically costs $500 to $700at his firm.

Fidelity is singled out the most as a source of frustration inconversations with industry players. That may simply be becauseit's the biggest player in the 401(k) world.Defined-contribution plans Fidelity administers cover morethan 18 million participants.

"I would love to have their business model, because they refuseto speak with anybody. You can't get a human being, and there is nonegotiation," said Burns, the QDRO and pension valuation expert."It's just pay them the amount or you don't get the QDRO. If youchange an 'and' or a 'but,' they will refuse to accept the form andyou get charged $1,200."

Materially altering the form by changing a specific definitionof a term such as earnings, or wanting to arrange payments from theretirement account in a way not offered on the form,would cost $1,200, said Michael Shamrell, a Fidelityspokesman. "Inconsequential or jurisdictional changes would notresult in a higher fee—such as the court requiring inclusion ofspecific language, or minimal changes to content," he said.

Fidelity noted that 10 to 15 percent of the company's plansponsors use it as an administrator of QDROs. It did11,200 in 2016, and 62 percent went through its web site. AtVanguard, less than a fifth of the plans for which it doesrecord-keeping use it for QDROs, said Vanguard spokesperson EmilyFarrell in an email.

Rough industry analysis that Vanguard has seen "suggeststhat fees are trending slightly upward," Farrell said. Vanguard'spricing has had "some upticks over the last decade, consistent withindustry trends, but they have been small."

Still, as more Americans ask, What's a QDRO? and What'sthis QDRO thing you're billing me for? and Why am I paying $1,800for a blanking QDRO?, it is becoming an unwelcome part of ourfinancial vocabulary.

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