Santa Ana, Nearly $25 Million in unclaimed money was returned by Wisconsin’s unclaimed money department, in 2007 reported the WI treasury office Thursday.
Wisconsin Treasury Department paid out 24,616 unclaimed money claims in 2007 stated Treasurer, Dawn Marie. The average claim was over $1,000 and the unclaimed cash paid out totaled $24,730,582.
This sets a record for the highest amount of unclaimed money returned by Wisconsin in a year.
In a written statement Wisconsin Treasurer Marie touted, "...our unclaimed property department is doing an excellent job serving the people of this state."
She neglected to acknowledge the hundreds of thousands of dollars private companies, such as Cashunclaimed.com, have spent reaching out to the public, including the residents of Wisconsin.
Many state treasury offices did very little in the past to reach out to the public and inform them of unclaimed money. Some states only published a generic ad in a small paper to advertise unclaimed money to the public.
State governments use unclaimed money they receive to lighten the load on their strapped budgets. No wonder they were not eager to return BILLIONS of dollars to the people.
The public should be informed of the unclaimed money, not only in Wisconsin, but nationwide. The national total of unclaimed money now totals nearly $35 BILLION.
Recognizing the need for a greater outreach to the public and the additional need to give people an easy way to find their unclaimed money, private companies built databases that combined unclaimed money from all 50 states and federal databases then spent huge sums of money advertising "Unclaimed Money" to the public.
Coincidentally, since the creation of these private higher quality sites that spend money to make the public aware of unclaimed money the total of returned unclaimed cash has grown BILLIONS!
Unclaimed money, commonly known as unclaimed property, includes forgotten checking and savings accounts, uncashed payroll checks and tax refund checks, utility deposit refunds, stocks, bonds and dividends, and even safety deposit box contents.
For most states the statute requires that after one to five years of inactivity businesses across the country are required to turn all unclaimed money and unclaimed property to the state treasurer’s office for safekeeping.
All people are strongly urged to search and see if they are owed unclaimed money.
Cashunclaimed.com is the largest unclaimed money database, including all state and federal databases. CashUnclaimed.com was founded to assist owners in easily locating and claiming their lost funds. The site offers more information on unclaimed money and free unclaimed money search at www.cashunclaimed.com.
