<prompt> Human: My spouses old employer a public school contributed a decent amount to a 403b account for her, but the only options provided for investments were annuities. She is no longer with the employer and would like to roll over the money into an IRA, since at 1.5 it will not even double once before we retire. I helped her create a rollover IRA in her name at Fidelity, where I also have a rollover IRA, but when we contacted the annuity company, they sent us complicated paperwork which required signatures of people in charge at her old employer. They couldnt tell us whose signatures were needed, even after pressing them for an answer, and only gave us the following boilerplate: You are now required to receive approval from your employer. You will need to contact your employer to determine the procedure for plan approval.We dont even know who to contact at her old employer since most of the staff she worked with are gone. Is this really legit or is the annuity company just giving us a hard time to keep from selling? Ive never heard of requiring an old employers permission to roll over a retirement account... That seems crazy. Short of walking in the door at the public school and asking whoever we can find, do we have any other options? Thanks in advance.  <response>: You need to contact your wifes HR department or whoever handled payroll---this isnt complicated. I dont think this too outside the box and they probably have dealt with this many times. 