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Unclaimed Property Division Main Page

Fellow Californians: 

Since taking office in 2007, returning property to their rightful owners has been one of my top priorities, so I wanted to share with you the significant improvements that my office has made to the program in the last two years:

Notifying Owners Before Their Property Is Sent To The State: For two decades, misguided state laws restricted the State Controller's Office from contacting the owners of more than 80% of all unclaimed property accounts sent to the State. In August 2007, the Legislature passed and the Governor signed legislation that allows the State Controller to send property owners notices before their property is transferred to the State. In Fiscal Year 2007-08, my office sent out 855,883 such notices. As a result, 225,752 properties were claimed before they were even sent to the State. In this past fiscal year, we sent out 950,332 notices. 

Established a Locator Unit: We re-established a unit that aggressively finds and tracks down owners to reunite them with their property. Our priority is to notify owners who had never received a notice due to the previous restrictions on our ability to notify owners.

Upgraded The Claims Processing System: The new database system allows staff to more easily search for properties and process claims more efficiently. We also have begun posting properties to our unclaimed property search page on the Internet within weeks after they are reported by businesses transferring the property, rather than taking a year before posting the properties.

In the first year after these reforms, we were able to send out 2.5 million notices; more than double the 1.2 million notices we sent during the past decade.

I want Californians to know that I am putting them first. I realize there is much more work to do, and I will continue to improve the State's ability to put property back in the rightful owners' hands.

Reforms I Am Pursuing:

• Restore interest paid on claims.
• Protect owners of safe deposit boxes by prohibiting financial institutions from sending them to the State if the owner has other active accounts, and requiring banks to hold onto inactive boxes for five years instead of the current three.
• Impose strict penalties on banks, utility companies, and other businesses that fail to comply with the law and notify their customers of unclaimed property they are holding.

I will continue to pursue reforms to the Unclaimed Property Program and invite your suggestions and support along the way. My intent is to restore the public's confidence that their lost property will be safeguarded by the State until property owners can claim what is rightfully theirs.

Sincerely,

JOHN CHIANG
California State Controller