(Part 1 of 2)

The state of California’s unclaimed funds program takes in roughly three hundred million dollars every year. Why should you care? Well, if you or anyone you know is or ever 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 heap of CA lost assets might very well be yours!

Under the California unclaimed property (or escheat) law, missing money such as forgotten checking and savings accounts, uncashed checks and money orders, mineral deposits, salary checks, cash and stock dividends, state of California unclaimed tax refunds, gift certificates, and other assets are passed along to the Treasury Dept. if the rightful owners don’t come for them within a certain time period. This ‘dormancy period’ varies from state to state, but in CA it’s 3 years. These abandoned assets then go to the CA unclaimed property division, where they sit in the state’s general fund until returned to the people they truly belong to. This is where state officials who handled CA unclaimed cash were criticized recently. It appears that they have been all to happy to track down and take hold of the lost assets from the establishments holding them but but weren’t so keen on contacting the owners in the CA unclaimed funds list.

One of the primary reasons for the government’s inability to return forgotten money to the people it belongs to, they claim, is the fact that they cannot be tracked down. The issue is, who would think people like ZsaZsa Gabor, Angelina Jolie, Victoria Beckham, Gerri Halliwell, Brad Pitt, Keanu Reeves, Jennifer Lopez, Adam Sandler and Marlon Brando could be hard to locate? Their names and the names of a number of other celebrities are just a few of the names in the CA missing money database and yet they haven’t heard from the officials in the California Unclaimed Funds Division. They’re all owed checks for unclaimed money by CA ranging in amount from hundreds to the thousands in Ms. Jolie’s case. This proves once again CA state employees’ interest in holding this money in the general fund for use in balancing the budget deficit for as long as they can. As a matter of fact, there was recently a ruling by a judge on CA abandoned money, stating 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 actual owners was enacted.

(to be continued)

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