(Part 1 of 2)

The California’s unclaimed property program takes in approximately 300 million dollars every year. Why should you care? Well, if you or anyone you know is or 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 massive pile of CA lost assets could very well belong to you!

Under the California unclaimed funds law, missing money 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 turned over to the Treasury Department if the rightful owners don’t come for them within a given period. This ‘dormancy period’ varies widely from state to state, but in CA it’s 3 years. These abandoned assets then go to the California unclaimed property div, where they wait in the state’s general fund until they’re returned to the rightful owners. This is where officials working for the state who handled CA unclaimed cash were recently criticized. It seems that they have been eager to track down and collect the lost assets from the establishments holding them but but weren’t so keen on locating the owners in the CA unclaimed property records.

One of the primary reasons for the inability of government to return forgotten cash to the people it belongs to, they say, is the fact that they can’t be tracked down. Problem is, would would ever think people like ZsaZsa Gabor, Angelina Jolie, Victoria Beckham, Gerri Halliwell, Brad Pitt, Keanu Reeves, Jennifer Lopez, Adam Sandler and Marlon Brando would be difficult to locate? Those names and the names of several other celebrities 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 Funds Division. They are all owed checks for forgotten funds by CA ranging in amount from hundreds to the thousands as in the case of Angelina Jolie. This just proves CA state officials’ interest in keeping this money in the general fund for them to balance the budget deficits for as long as they can. In fact, there was a recent ruling by a federal judge on CA abandoned cash, 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 take and hold it until a proper method of returning it to the rightful owners has been adopted.

(to be continued)

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