(Part 1 of 2)

The California’s unclaimed property program takes in roughly $300 million every year. Why does it matter to you? Well, if you or someone 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 massive pile of Cali unclaimed money might very well be yours!

Under the California unclaimed funds 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 financial assets are turned over to the Department of the Treasury if their owners don’t come for them within a certain time period. This ‘dormancy period’ varies from state to state, but in Cali it is three years. These lost assets then go to the CA unclaimed property div, where they sit in the state’s general fund until returned to their rightful owners. This is where state officials who handled Cali unclaimed cash were recently criticized. Seems that they have been all to happy to track down and collect the lost assets from the establishments holding on to them but but weren’t so keen on tracking down the owners in the Cali unclaimed money list.

One of the primary reasons for the government’s inability give back forgotten money to the people it belongs to, they say, is the fact that they cannot be tracked down. The problem is, who would think people like Jennifer Lopez, Victoria Beckham, Brad Pitt, Adam Sandler, Angelina Jolie ,Marlon Brando, Keanu Reeves, ZsaZsa Gabor and Gerri Halliwell could be difficult to locate? Those names and the names of a number of other celebrities are just some of the names in the Cali missing money database but they haven’t been contacted by the officials in the California Unclaimed Money Division. They are all owed checks for unclaimed money by Cali amounting from hundreds to the thousands in Ms. Jolie’s case. This proves once again Cali state officials’ interest in holding this money in the general fund for them to balance the budget deficits for as long as they possibly can. As a matter of fact, there was recently a ruling by a federal judge on CA abandoned assets, saying that the state was not making enough of an effort 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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