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On
February 1, 2025, State Treasurer Deborah B. Goldberg and the
National Association of Unclaimed Property Administrators
(NAUPA) celebrated National Unclaimed Property Day, and sent out a press release to let everyone know.
In
2021, to increase awareness of unclaimed property,
NAUPA launched the first National Unclaimed Property Day.
Then and now, it is a day to
encourage everyone to search missingmoney.com to
determine if a state is holding their property, including in
Massachusetts where one in ten residents have unclaimed property.
The Unclaimed Property Division
is currently holding over $3.4 billion. Treasurer Goldberg urges all
citizens to review the state’s comprehensive list for all amounts
at FindMassMoney.gov or call our live call center at 888-344-MASS
(6277).
“It’s Unclaimed Property Day,
so take a minute to check for your name or a family member, a
friend, and even a business that might be listed,” said
State Treasurer Deborah B. Goldberg. “Our
team is ready, willing and able to walk you through the process and
reunite you with your property.”
Unclaimed property includes
forgotten savings and checking accounts, un-cashed checks, insurance
policy proceeds, stocks, dividends, and the contents of unattended
safe deposit boxes. Most accounts are considered abandoned and
are turned over to the state after three years of inactivity. In
2024,
Treasury
processed over 131,000 claims and returned $191 million
in property to
its rightful owners.
There
is no time limit for a person to recover this property and,
in many cases, claimants will receive interest. Searching is always
free by using FindMassMoney.gov.
Too Good to Be True?
OK, so far so good, but could the Commonwealth of Massachusetts really manage to make anything work that well? We wondered, we asked. and we got a very thorough response from Mark William Bracken, J.D. in the Treasurer's Office. Below, slightly redacted, is what he wrote...
I would have to disagree [with the assertion made by Observer] that
the process has grown much more complex and actually say with
complete certainty that
the process has grown exponentially easier. First, the statute and
regulations on the claims procedure has not be changed in more than
15 years, maybe longer. The requirements on what is needed for proof
to claim are exactly the same, and any modification outside of the
law around claiming has made things easier.
I will start with 10 years ago because you referenced a 10 year
period. 10 years ago, the only way to claim property involved calling
our office and getting a claim form mailed out to you or going online
to the Division’s website, which at that point was almost 15 years
old, doing a search which only offered very limited information and
submitting an inquiry. The claimant would then have to wait to see if
the inquiry was a match, days if not weeks later, and if it was, the
office would print a claim form and mail it out. The claimant would
then have to fill out the form, gather required documentation and
mail it in. After being reviewed weeks, if not months later, the
claim had to be returned for more information, the process of mailing
things back and forth ensued.
A New Era
In 2017 we launch our new website and internal database. Now a player
can still call into our office and go online but the experience is
much different. When visiting our website, we offer more information
including the address that was listed to the name so that someone
searching, say John Smith, will see that the property we are holding
belongs to John Smith who lived at 10 Main Street, Quincy, MA when
the old John Smith only saw his name and Quincy. The simple addition
of an address, which was not available under the old system, narrowed
down property searches for the claimants, making it easier to
identify property.
Before, under the old system, only property valued at $50 or more
showed up with a search online. Now anything valued at $1 or more
shows up.
Before the only way to get a claim form when you search online was
for the Division to mail a paper claim form. Now, while a person can
still request a paper claim, every claimant is emailed a PDF of the
claim within 20 minutes of making the inquiry and it is in their
hands ready for action.
Before the only way to then submit a claim was to mail in your
documents or walk them into the Boston office. Now, there are
multiple ways. First, if you enter all your information online and do
the electronic certification, the Division runs your information
against 3rd party databases. If all the information matches, you do
not have to fill out any paperwork and your claim is automatically
approved. Looking at a 3-month period from 8/1/24-10/31/24 the office
paid out 34,730 claims. Of these claims 14,936 were fast-tracked and
the claimant had to deal with no paperwork. No long processing time.
No lags. Additionally for claimants that do not go through the fast
track process the claimant now has the option to upload their claim
in an extremely easy process on our website. This process uploads the
claim right into our system and our claim processors can access the
documents almost instantaneously. The convenience is enhanced even
more because a claimant can fill out what they need or gather
whatever document or evidence and simply take pictures of them with
their phone and upload the pics right on our website through their
phone, it does not have to be a scanned PDF. Of course, if a
claimant wishes, they can also still mail in their claim or hand
deliver to our Boston office, but the mail option only accounts for
around 10-15 percent of claims as people prefer the most easier
digital option that has been offered since 2017.
Results
Up until 2011, the division returned between $55M to $65M a year to
the people of the commonwealth. We now average returning around $150M
a year and in the last 5 years we have returned $787,097,378 million
dollars. I would not call 3/4ths of a billion dollars “window
dressing”. I would also like to point out that you are incorrect
that the Commonwealth collects the interest on these properties and
does not share with the actual owners. We actually pay interest on
almost every property at 1% for the first 14 years we hold the
property if we hold it that long. In FY24 we retuned over
$140,663,000 in property and paid over $5,460,400 in interest to the
owners, even on properties that are not interest bearing. Say you
have a $50 credit with Comcast. It sits at Comcast. The owner does
not get any interest, ever, from Comcast. Yet once it comes to the
Division, it begins to accrue 1% while we hold it and we return that
to the owner when they claim.
10 plus years ago, very few people even knew of unclaimed property.
The Division only advertised in a limited way. It ran radio ads 3
weeks in March and 3 weeks in September and these radio ads were only
on 3-4 stations. Also in those months it put the insert of names
(then capped at 40 pages so some names would have to wait to be
published the following 6 months)in only the Boston Globe and Boston
Herald and then took out add space in about 10 regional papers where
they would only place the names for people that got property turned
over in the zip code of that paper’s circulation. Additionally, the
Division use to attend about 10 or so public events a year to search
for people’s names. Now, the Division runs radio on over a dozen
radio stations year-round. The Division runs a robust and significant
television campaign on all the major networks in the Boston market as
well as Springfield market year-round. The Division runs millions of
impressions online where people can click directly to our website.
The Division also attends 30+ (sometimes 75+) public events a year to
search peoples names. Lastly, the Division now inserts the full
insert (which has been expanded to around 60 pages and contains 1/3
more names) in over 20 papers statewide, allowing a great access to
the new names being turned over.
I could go on about how nothing this Division does is window
dressing, and I could give many more examples how the process is
significantly easier now than it was 15…10…even 5 years ago, but
I will leave it as the examples I mentioned above.
[Thanks Mark, Nicely Done!]
