(Part 1 of 2)

The state of California’s unclaimed funds program takes in approximately three hundred million dollars each year. Why does it matter to you? 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), a chunk of that big pile of Cali forgotten funds could easily belong to you!

Under the California unclaimed property (or escheat) law, abandoned assets such as 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 passed along to the Treasury Dept. if their owners don’t come for them within a given period. This ‘dormancy period’ varies widely from state to state, but in Cali 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 they are returned to their rightful owners. This is where state officials in-charge of the Cali 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 contacting the owners in the Cali unclaimed funds records.

One of the primary reasons for the government’s inability give back forgotten cash to its owners, they claim, is that they can’t be located. Problem is, who would think 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 locate? Those names and the names of several other celebrities are just some of the names in the Cali missing money list but they haven’t heard from the employees at the California Unclaimed Property Division. They’re all owed checks for unclaimed money by Cali amounting from hundreds to the thousands as in the case of Angelina Jolie. This just shows Cali state employees’ interest in keeping this cash in the general fund for them to balance the budget deficit for as long as they can. In fact, there was recently a ruling by a federal judge on CA abandoned assets, saying that the state wasn’t making enough of an effort to locate the rightful owners and for a while halted the ability of the state to seize it until a proper method of reuniting it with the rightful owners was enacted.

(to be continued)

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Need money? You may have some coming (The Shawano Leader)
You may have money you didn’t even know about. Do you want to know how to retrieve it? The Office of the State Treasurer is printing names of people who have unclaimed funds in Wisconsin for 2008.

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