By Randy Hutchinson
President of the BBB
Reprinted from The Commercial Appeal
A Tennessee woman attending an event stopped at a booth being manned by the Tennessee Department of Treasury’s Unclaimed Property Division and came away with $1,285 left over from the estate of her mother who died 10 years earlier. The Division’s website has pictures of other people who learned they had unclaimed property, most of them for amounts in the hundreds of dollars but one for $12,557.13.
When a business or other organization has had no contact with, and can’t locate the owner of, certain kinds of property after a specified period of time, it’s required to turn the property over to its State Treasury. Unclaimed property most commonly includes savings or checking accounts, stocks, uncashed dividend or payroll checks, traveler’s checks, trust distributions, unredeemed money orders or gift certificates, and proceeds from life insurance policies.
It may also include some forms of tangible property such as the contents of safe deposit boxes and military service medals. The latter are the only form of tangible property the Tennessee Unclaimed Property Division safeguards.
Almost $155 million was turned over to the Tennessee Unclaimed Property Division in Fiscal Year 2023. It returned almost $64 million to 65,000 people, an average of $981, and still has more than $940 million waiting to be returned to its rightful owners. A recent report said that California is holding $13 billion and New York $19 billion.
Tennessee’s Unclaimed Property Division says 1 in 10 people have unclaimed property being held by one or more states. The National Association of Unclaimed Property Administrators (NAUPA) says 1 in 7.
Common reasons you may have unclaimed property include:
- You’ve moved frequently and checks weren’t forwarded.
- You failed to close a bank account and forgot about it.
- You’re the beneficiary of a life insurance policy or estate that you don’t know about and the company or executor couldn’t locate you.
Tennessee’s Unclaimed Property Division does its best to locate owners of unclaimed property. It sends notices to the person’s last known address and, if that doesn’t work, conducts searches through Department of Labor and Workforce Development records, telephone directories, and drivers’ license records. It also sets up booths at public events.
There’s no time limit on claiming property that rightfully belongs to you. You can determine if there’s money owed you somewhere by visiting MissingMoney.com, the official unclaimed property website of the National Association of State Treasurers, or state websites including ClaimItTn.gov in Tennessee. The websites include instructions on filing a claim; there’s no fee.
If you’re contacted by a third party telling you that you have unclaimed property somewhere and offering to help you get it for a fee, do your due diligence before paying up front, including checking them out with the BBB. Some are scammers that will take your money and run, while others will simply refer you to one or more unclaimed property websites.
Third-party locators of unclaimed property have to be licensed as private investigators in Tennessee. They can’t claim to be affiliated with the State, must execute a contract with the consumer that has been approved by the State, and can charge no more than 10 percent of the value of the recovered property or $50, whichever is greater.