Stacy Garrity: Working to return $4.5 billion in unclaimed property

As state treasurer, one of my top priorities is returning unclaimed property to its rightful owners. Right now, the Pennsylvania Treasury Department is working to return more than $4.5 billion to hardworking people across the commonwealth. In fact, about one in 10 Pennsylvanians has money waiting. I encourage everyone to search online at patreasury.gov/unclaimed-property to see if any of those billions of dollars belong to you.

In the fiscal year that ended on June 30, Treasury returned a record amount of unclaimed property — more than $273.7 million.

Setting that record took a lot of hard work — and it also reflects big improvements we’ve made over the past few years. In 2021, we rolled out the first major systemwide upgrade in more than 15 years. Last year, we introduced the ability for claimants to get their money back via direct deposit.

We’ve also instituted a fast-track system to allow many claims to pass through an automated approval process which results in payment being released in just weeks if the claimant’s identity is confirmed. Since we have a duty to ensure that money is returned only to its rightful owner, if the system finds a mismatch of even one validation, the claim must move a more detailed manual review.

As you might expect, manual reviews require more time to process than claims which proceed through the entirely automated fast-track process. At any given time, thousands of claims are moving through the approval process. Many are fairly straightforward, but some require extra detective work, such as when a rightful owner is deceased, when properties involve trusts, non-probated wills or court orders, or when other hurdles stand in the way of determining who the rightful owner really is.

It’s my job to safeguard unclaimed property until we locate the rightful owner. Making sure someone who files a claim really owns the unclaimed property is something we take very seriously, and sometimes that can be a time-consuming process. No one wants claims to be approved faster than me, but verifying a claimant’s identity is essential — especially with the constant threat of scammers and identity thieves.

State law requires most unclaimed property to be sent to Treasury after three years of inactivity. Unclaimed property can be anything from a forgotten bank account or stocks to insurance policies or uncashed checks like an old rebate or a last paycheck from a previous job, or so many other financial assets. It can even be tangible items — like contents of abandoned safe deposit boxes such as family heirlooms tucked away for safekeeping.

I’m always looking for ways to make the process even better, and here’s some great news on that front: The state Senate unanimously passed legislation, Senate Bill 24, to establish a program called Pennsylvania Money Match.

I’m excited about this because PA Money Match will allow Treasury to directly return unclaimed monies to rightful owners — without the owner needing to take any action. Following a thorough identity verification process, we will be able to automatically return individually owned properties valued up to $5,000. Programs like this are up and running successfully in 14 other states, and Pennsylvania should be next.

Stacy Garrity is Pennsylvania treasurer.