Legal Question in Business Law in Washington

This depends on the rules of your particular pension plan. An attorney would have to read them before being able to answer.

If it turns out that you cannot make the conversion, one alternative is to sell your right to collect on the pension to a third party who will pay you a lump sum of cash in return for your payments going to them. The problem with this is that you will have to take a huge discount on what you otherwise would get, since this needs to be financially feasible for the third party and they have no idea how long you will live, so they are taking a risk by paying you off in cash.