How long does it take to get the money in your 401(k), profit-sharing plan, or employee stock ownership plans when you change jobs or retire?

Longer than you might think.

When Lorry Miceli, a nurse in Durham, N.C., changed jobs in October, she tried to roll her 401(k) account into an IRA.

But neither she, nor 300 other employees who were laid off from the company last fall, has yet received a dime of their savings. "It's been seven months," she complains. "How long do I have to wait?"

"That's the most frequently asked question we get," says Samuel Murray, vice president for government affairs of the Profit Sharing/401(k) Council of America.

The answer isn't especially comforting. Legally, employers can wait until 60 days after the year in which you turn 65 years old to turn over your retirement savings. Even if that's decades away, ESOPs(*) can take as long as a decade.

As a practical matter, however, most employers turn the money over sooner than that - typically, within months after you leave the job. Many companies wait until after the quarter has closed.

Many employers do a rotten job of explaining what the rules are, which leads to a lot of unnecessary fretting among ex-employees, says Mr. Murray.

There are, of course, cases of employers stealing assets or losing all the retirement money in woebegone investments. So, an employer's reluctance to cut a check to a departing worker could be a red flag. But most of the time, it just means the bean counters are abiding by the rules, or bungling the paperwork. Or both.

Under its operating guidelines, Mrs. Miceli's former employer, Horizon/ CMS Healthcare Corp., an Albuquerque operator of long-term care and rehabilitation facilities, would have distributed her 401(k) money in January. Because the plan is updated quarterly, requests made last fall for rollovers could have been processed only after Dec. 31.

But as the months rolled along, Mrs. Miceli continued to call Horizon's benefits department to ask about the status of her rollover. She was told to call Merrill Lynch & Co., the retirement plan's administrator. She says she got no answers about the delay from Merrill Lynch, either.

Who's to blame for the snafu? Leslie Moss, the benefits director at Horizon, says it can't distribute the money until it receives valuations from Merrill, which she says are late. September valuations, for example, arrived on April 11. Meanwhile, a spokeswoman for Merrill says that after receiving year-end information from Horizon at the end of February, Merrill completed the qualified account valuations and statement processing necessary for making employee distributions.

And after that, Merrill says, the responsibility for handling distributions became someone else's problem since Horizon dumped Merrill as its plan administrator. With a new administrator taking over April 1, paperwork has been further delayed, so it's unlikely Mrs. Miceli or the other former employees will see their money before summer.

Still, they'd have to wait a lot longer if their money were in an ESOP, which is governed by different rules. If you are fired or quit, employers can wait five years to begin making distributions from ESOPs, and can take an additional five years to pay all the money out. In practice, however, ESOPs commonly distribute the money in two to three years, says Michael Keeling, president of the ESOP Association, a trade group in Washington.

*Employee Stock Ownership Plan