(Part 1 of 2)

The state of California’s unclaimed property department takes in roughly three hundred million dollars annually. Why should you care? Well, if you or someone 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), part of that big heap of Cali unclaimed money could easily belong to you!

Under the CA unclaimed property law, lost 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 handed 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 abandoned assets then go to the CA unclaimed property div, where they wait in the state’s general fund until they are returned to the rightful owners. This is where state officials who handled Cali unclaimed cash were recently criticized. It appears that they were all to happy to locate and take hold of the lost assets from the establishments holding on to them but showed less interest in contacting the actual owners in the Cali unclaimed property database.

One of the primary reasons for the inability of government to return forgotten cash to its owners, they say, is that they can’t be tracked down. The issue is, would would ever 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 several other celebrities are some of the names in the Cali 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 Cali ranging in amount from hundreds to the thousands in Ms. Jolie’s case. This just shows Cali state officials’ interest in holding this money in the general fund for use in balancing the budget deficits for as long as they can. In fact, there was recently a ruling by a federal judge on CA abandoned cash, stating that the state wasn’t doing enough to locate the rightful owners and for a while halted the ability of the state to take and hold it until a better policy of returning it to the rightful owners was enacted.

(to be continued)

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Businesses, consumers can check state Web site for … – Bellingham Herald
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