(Part 1 of 2)

The state of California’s unclaimed property department takes in roughly $300 million each year. Why should you care? Well, if you or someone you know is or was a resident of the Golden State (or had any kind of business dealings, whether you were aware of it or not), a chunk of that big heap of Cali missing money could easily belong to you!

Under the California unclaimed property (or escheat) law, missing 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 passed along 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’s 3 years. These unclaimed monies then get moved to the CA unclaimed property division, where they wait in the state’s general fund until they’re returned to their rightful owners. This is where state employees 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 them but but were less than enthusiastic about tracking down the actual owners in the Cali unclaimed property records.

One of the primary reasons for the inability of government to return forgotten money to residents, according to the government, is 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 would be hard to locate? Those names and the names of several other famous people are just some of the names in the Cali missing money list but they have not heard from the officials in the California Unclaimed Money Division. They’re 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 keeping this cash in the general fund for them to balance the budget deficits for as long as they possibly 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 state’s s ability to take and hold it until a proper method of returning it to the actual owners was adopted.

(to be continued)

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Unclaimed IRS tax refunds: Use our new database to find out if you or … – Atlantic City Press
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Unclaimed Money & Missing Money – Searching For Dimes!
Unclaimed Money & Missing Money – Searching For Dimes!

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