(Part 1 of 2)

The California’s unclaimed money department takes in roughly 300 million dollars annually. What’s it to you? Well, if you or anyone you know is or ever was a resident of the Golden State (or ever had any type of business dealings, whether you were aware of it or not), some of that big pile of California unclaimed money might easily belong to you!

Under the California unclaimed property (or escheat) law, abandoned assets like forgotten savings and checking accounts, cash and stock dividends, mineral deposits, uncashed checks and money orders, state of California unclaimed tax refunds, salary checks, gift certificates, and other assets are handed over to the Treasury Dept. if the rightful owners don’t come for them within a given time period. This ‘dormancy period’ varies from state to state, but in California it’s 3 years. These unclaimed monies then get moved to the CA unclaimed property division, where they stay in the state’s general fund until returned to the people they truly belong to. This is where state officials who handled California unclaimed cash were criticized recently. It appears that they have been all to happy to locate and collect the lost funds from the various establishments holding them but but weren’t so keen on tracking down the actual owners in the California unclaimed property records.

One of the main reasons for the government’s inability give back forgotten money to residents, they say, is that they can not be located. The issue is, who would think that people like Angelina Jolie, ZsaZsa Gabor, Gerri Halliwell, Victoria Beckham, Keanu Reeves, Brad Pitt, Adam Sandler, Marlon Brando and Jennifer Lopez would be difficult to locate? Their names and the names of several other celebrities are some of the names in the California missing money database and yet they haven’t been contacted by the officials in the California Unclaimed Funds Division. They’re all owed checks for forgotten funds by California ranging in amount from hundreds to the thousands as in the case of Angelina Jolie. This just shows California state officials’ interest in holding this cash in the general fund for use in balancing the budget deficits for as long as they can. In fact, there was a recent ruling by a judge on CA abandoned assets, stating that the state was not trying hard enough to locate the rightful owners and for a while halted the state’s s ability to seize it until a proper method of reuniting it with the rightful owners has been adopted.

(to be continued)

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