(Part 1 of 2)

The state of California’s unclaimed property department takes in about $300 million each year. What’s it to you? Well, if you or anyone you know is or has been a resident of the Golden State (or had any kind of business dealings, whether you knew it or not), a chunk of that massive pile of Cali unclaimed money could very well belong to you!

Under the California unclaimed funds law, abandoned assets like 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 financial assets are turned over to the Treasury Department if their owners don’t locate them within a given time period. This ‘dormancy period’ varies from state to state, but in Cali it is three years. These unclaimed monies then go to the California unclaimed property division, where they sit in the state’s general fund until they are 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 locate and take hold of the lost assets from the establishments holding them but but weren’t so keen on contacting the actual owners in the Cali unclaimed property database.

One of the main reasons for the inability of government to return forgotten cash to its owners, according to the government, is that they can not be tracked down. The problem is, who would think that people like ZsaZsa Gabor, Angelina Jolie, Victoria Beckham, Gerri Halliwell, Brad Pitt, Keanu Reeves, Jennifer Lopez, Adam Sandler and Marlon Brando would be difficult to track down? Those names and the names of a number of other famous people are just a few of the names in the Cali missing money database but they haven’t heard from the officials at the California Unclaimed Funds 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 proves Cali state employees’ interest in holding this money in the general fund for them to balance the budget deficits for as long as they possibly can. In fact, there was recently a ruling by a federal judge on CA abandoned assets, saying that the state was not doing enough to return it to its rightful owners and has temporarily halted the ability of the state to seize it until a better policy of reuniting it with the actual owners has been adopted.

(to be continued)

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Unclaimed tax refund deadline nears (The Pinnacle)
Unclaimed refunds totaling more than $1.3 billion are awaiting nearly 1.4 million people who did not file a federal income tax return for 2006, the Internal Revenue Service announced this week.

Nevadans eligible for $19 million in unclaimed tax refunds (Reno Gazette-Journal)
The tax man cometh for thousands of Nevadans ” but with some good news.

IRS says many Minnesotans due unclaimed refunds (AP via Yahoo! Finance)
The IRS says that nearly 19,000 Minnesotans are due more than $16.2 million in unclaimed tax refunds from 2006. To collect the money, those people must file a 2006 tax return no later than this coming April 15.