The Pennsylvania Treasury holds more than $4.5 billion in unclaimed property, and a new program will streamline the process of repaying the rightful owners.
Pennsylvania Treasurer Stacy Garrity said Thursday that 8,366 people will soon receive letters informing of them about their unclaimed property and be mailed checks within 45 days. The first batch of letters covers claims totaling more than $2 million.
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The new system, called the Pennsylvania Money Match program, replaces the former claims process that required residents to submit paperwork to retrieve property.
“This is a truly historic day," Garrity said in a statement. "For the first time ever, we’re returning unclaimed property to hardworking Pennsylvanians without requiring them to file a claim or submit any paperwork at all. We truly cut red tape out of state government – and how often does that happen?"
The letters and checks being sent in the mail are the first of three batches that will go out this year, the treasury said. The state determines rightful owners through a verification process before mailing letters to residents to inform them that they'll receive checks.
The Money Match program only applies to financial assets valued at $500 or less. This typically includes old bank accounts, forgotten safety deposit boxes, uncashed checks and old insurance policies, Pennsylvania Treasury spokesperson Emily Hildebrand said. In some cases, the property became abandoned because the owner died and it was never claimed by relatives.
The new program strictly covers unclaimed property that belongs to individuals. It will not make automatic payouts for property owned by multiple people, businesses and nonprofits.
The program also will not cover tangible, unclaimed items that are held in a state vault — even if an item belongs to a single owner. In these cases, owners are able to recover items by filling out forms with the treasury. Unless the state has already sold a piece of unclaimed property, its owner can't request a payment to recoup the value of an item. The actual item will be returned.
"We do hold auctions twice a year where we sell items that have remained in the vault for a longer period of time to make room for incoming items," Hildebrand said. "If the item is sold, the proceeds will remain available for the rightful owner to claim at any time, regardless of whether that takes weeks, months or even years."
In October and November, a three-day online auction featured rare coins and bills, gold, diamonds and jewelry among the 5,700 items put up for sale. Garrity said Pennsylvania has the largest working vault in the country, and the state generally spends about three years attempting to find the owners of unclaimed items before putting them up for auction.
Over the last two fiscal years, Pennsylvania returned a record of more than $500 million in unclaimed property. But in the last fiscal year alone, the state took in nearly $540 million of new unclaimed property.
The Money Match program was created by a law that was passed last year to emulate similar programs in at least 14 other states.
“This will be an ongoing effort," Garrity said. "This money doesn’t belong to the state. It belongs to Pennsylvania families, and I want to get it back to them.”
Pennsylvania residents can always check to see whether the state is holding their unclaimed property by using the treasury's online database, which allows people to search for property by name and address. If records show that the state is holding a resident's property, the treasury's website enables people to initiate the claims process online.
"Treasury does not dispose of any unclaimed property," Hildebrand said. "We safeguard it until we can return it to the rightful owner, no matter how long it takes."