August 18, 2008
Locate Unclaimed Assets in CA – Part 1 of 2
(Part 1 of 2)
The state of California’s unclaimed funds department takes in approximately three hundred million dollars every year. Why should you care? Well, if you or someone you know is or has been a resident of the Golden State (or had any kind of business dealings, whether you knew it or not), some of that big heap of CA lost assets could easily belong to you!
Under the California unclaimed property law, abandoned assets like forgotten checking and savings accounts, uncashed checks and money orders, mineral deposits, salary checks, cash and stock dividends, state of California unclaimed tax refunds, gift certificates, and other financial assets are turned over to the Department of the Treasury if the rightful owners don’t come for them within a given time period. This ‘dormancy period’ varies from state to state, but in CA it is three years. These forgotten funds then go to the California unclaimed property division, where they wait in the state’s general fund until they are returned to the rightful owners. This is where state employees who handled CA unclaimed cash were criticized recently. Seems that they were all to happy to track down and collect the lost funds from the establishments holding on to them but but weren’t so keen on tracking down the owners in the CA unclaimed funds list.
One of the primary reasons for the inability of government to return forgotten cash to residents, they say, is the fact that they can not be tracked down. The problem is, would would ever think that people like Jennifer Lopez, Victoria Beckham, Brad Pitt, Adam Sandler, Angelina Jolie ,Marlon Brando, Keanu Reeves, ZsaZsa Gabor and Gerri Halliwell would be hard to locate? Those names and the names of several other famous people are just a few of the names in the CA missing money database but they have not been contacted by the officials in the California Unclaimed Property Division. They are all owed checks for lost assets by CA amounting from hundreds to the thousands in Ms. Jolie’s case. This proves once again CA state officials’ interest in holding this money in the general fund for use in balancing the budget deficits for as long as they can. In fact, there was recently a ruling by a federal judge on CA abandoned money, stating that the state wasn’t trying hard enough to locate the rightful owners and for a while halted the state’s s ability to seize it until a better policy of reuniting it with the actual owners has been adopted.
(to be continued)
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Unclaimed checks total nearly $1.4 (KPLC Lake Charles)
Associated Press – August 17, 2008 6:44 PM ET LAKE CHARLES, La. (AP) – There’s a lot of unclaimed money in Calcasieu Parish. Nearly 4,700 senior citizens in Calcasieu Parish have not…
Money Q&A: CDs, inheriting houses, and unclaimed money – New York Daily News
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Money Q&A: CDs, inheriting houses, and unclaimed money
New York Daily News, NY - Q. I found my name on a list of people owed unclaimed money. What do I need to do to have it sent to me? A. In New York, unclaimed property (a dormant bank … |
Do you have unclaimed cash? – WZZM
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Do you have unclaimed cash?
WZZM, MI - Online databases for unclaimed cash are frequently used by individuals hoping to get their hands on unclaimed money, but governments, businesses and even … |
