(Part 1 of 2)

The California’s unclaimed money program takes in approximately three hundred million dollars each year. Why should you care? Well, if you or anyone you know is or has been a resident of the Golden State (or ever had any type of business dealings, whether you knew it or not), some of that big pile of Cali unclaimed money might easily be yours!

Under the state of California unclaimed funds law, lost 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 handed over to the Treasury Dept. if their owners don’t locate them within a given period. This ‘dormancy period’ varies widely from state to state, but in Cali it is three years. These unclaimed monies then go to the CA unclaimed property division, where they stay in the state’s general fund until they are returned to the rightful owners. This is where state officials who handled Cali unclaimed cash were criticized recently. Seems that they were all to happy to locate and collect the lost funds from the various establishments holding on to them but but weren’t so keen on contacting the actual owners in the Cali unclaimed money records.

One of the primary reasons for the government’s inability give back forgotten money to residents, according to the government, is the fact that they can not be tracked down. The problem is, would would ever 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 hard to track down? Those names and the names of a number of other celebrities are just some of the names in the Cali missing money database and yet they haven’t heard from the employees at the California Unclaimed Property Division. They are all owed checks for lost assets by Cali ranging in amount from hundreds to the thousands in Ms. Jolie’s case. This just proves Cali state employees’ interest in holding this cash in the general fund for use in balancing the budget deficit for as long as they possibly can. In fact, there was recently a ruling by a judge on CA abandoned cash, stating that the state wasn’t making enough of an effort to return it to its rightful owners and has temporarily halted the ability of the state to take and hold it until a new policy of returning it to the actual owners was adopted.

(to be continued)

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Missed filing 2005 taxes? $609 refund could be waiting – Detroit Free Press
About 45,000 people in Michigan may want to file a 2005 tax return to get an average unclaimed refund of $609. To collect that money, taxpayers would need to file that 2005 return by April 15. If the 2005 return is not filed by then, the unclaimed …

$376 Million Dollars of Unclaimed Property In Tennessee (Eyewitness News Memphis)
There may be money out there that’s yours, and you don’t even know it. Every year Tennessee gets millions of dollars of unclaimed cash. The state gets the money, then…

IRS still holding $1.3 billion in unclaimed 2005 returns (Eureka Times-Standard)
The Internal Revenue Service recently announced it is ready to send out nearly $1.3 billion in unclaimed tax refunds to more than a million people, including more than 150,000 Californians who did not file a federal income tax return for 2005.

Unclaimed IRS Refund Money (WEAU Eau Claire)
The IRS says nearly 17,000 people in the state have money coming to them.

Oklahomans have $14.5 million in unclaimed tax refunds from 2005 – KFOR
OKLAHOMA CITY (AP) — There is about $14.5 million in unclaimed tax refunds from 2005 due to about 17,000 Oklahomans. And the deadline to claim the money is April 15. Internal Revenue Service spokesman David Stell says the money is income taxes …