Unclaimed Monies

If you have ever had a bank account, contributed money to a superannuation fund, owned shares in public companies or had a life policy then this article is for you.

Many of us, over the years, have forgotten about a bank account or lost count of the various superannuation funds that we have contributed to if you have moved jobs a number of times. Similarly, those of us who have small shareholdings, may have moved house and forgotten to advise the company of the new address and the twice yearly dividend payments have been returned to the company and ultimately ended up in the “lost” monies register. This is particularly the case with cane farmers who may have bought fertiliser many years ago from a company called ACF & Shirleys Fertilisers and Imperial Chemical Industries which later became ICI Australia and then Orica Limited.

Some canefarmers have never heard of Orica and are surprised to find they have a shareholding by this name or with a company called Ruralco Holdings Limited which was formerly known as Growforce Australia Limited.

What happens with such monies (for the purpose of this article we will call them “lost monies”) is that after a period of inactivity, in the case of a bank account, or when the dividends are returned to the company and no contact is able to be made with the shareholder, the funds are transferred by the institution to a government controlled entity to hold in the event that the owner will eventually be located.

There are a number of websites where you can search to see if you have any “lost” monies. All that is required is usually your full name, date of birth and sometimes your Tax File Number. These are listed later in this article.

We were contacted recently by a client who had received a letter from an organisation claiming to have located the sum of $548.00 in his name and advising him that they could retrieve these monies for him if he would provide various forms of identification, evidence of his address at the relevant time and proof of his link to the assets they had located.

Our client thought that the letter was a scam but, more importantly, was afraid that the information he was being asked to provide could lead to some form of identity theft.

In our experience, most of the organisations who send out this type of letter are in fact genuine and if the information is provided, the money is forthcoming less their “finder’s fee” which is usually a hefty percentage of the amount being claimed. It is always important to verify who it is you are providing your personal information to, to ensure you are not going to become a victim of identity theft.

The interesting thing is, however, that with a little bit of computer searching most people who are computer savvy would have the ability, in a very short period of time, to find these monies themselves if they simply knew where to look.

For the client in casino online question, I in fact found that not only was there $548.00 of unclaimed monies there was approximately a further $5,500.00. All of the monies related to unclaimed share dividends and unclaimed superannuation monies. It came about because the client had changed address and, clearly, the financial institutions had lost contact with him.

In other cases that we have been handling, we have located unclaimed monies in a betting account and insurance monies. The Federal Government recently made changes to the timeframe that elapses before banks and other institutions have to lodge monies from inactive accounts and some people have been shocked to find that the monies that they have had in a bank account for many years, because no transactions had occurred on the account for 3 years, were no longer there and have had to “claim their monies back”.

When two of the partners found out that I had located monies for a client they quickly requested that I do searches on their names but unfortunately these were fruitless.

If clients need some guidance in this regard we are more than happy to assist but we would encourage any client who receives such an unsolicited letter in the post, in the first instance, to at least go and have a look through the webpages mentioned below. Once the monies are located you can usually apply online to claim, printing the claim forms and providing identification and linking to the actual monies. By following this process, you can then retain 100% of your “lost” monies instead of giving away a percentage as a “finders fee”.

Some of the websites to search for lost or unclaimed monies are as follows: