(Part 1 of 2)

The California’s unclaimed property department takes in approximately 300 million dollars each 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 were aware of it or not), part of that big heap of Cali forgotten funds might easily be yours!

Under the CA unclaimed property (or escheat) 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 financial assets are turned over to the Treasury Department if the rightful owners don’t locate them within a given period. This ‘dormancy period’ varies widely from state to state, but in Cali it’s three years. These lost assets then head 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 officials working for the state in-charge of the Cali unclaimed cash were recently criticized. Seems that they have been eager to locate and collect the lost funds from the establishments holding them but showed less interest in tracking down the actual owners in the Cali unclaimed funds records.

One of the main reasons for the inability of government to return forgotten cash to the people it belongs to, according to the government, is that they can’t be tracked down. Problem 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 find? Their names and the names of several other famous people are just a few of the names in the Cali missing money database but they have never heard from the officials in the California Unclaimed Funds Division. They’re all owed checks for unclaimed money by Cali ranging in amount from hundreds to the thousands in Ms. Jolie’s case. This just proves Cali state officials’ interest in keeping this cash in the general fund for use in balancing the budget deficit for as long as they can. In fact, there was a recent ruling by a federal judge on CA abandoned assets, stating that the state wasn’t making enough of an effort to return it to its rightful owners and for a while halted the ability of the state 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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