Search For ‘Unclaimed Funds’ Ends In Disappointment

HOMETOWN ONEONTA/The Freeman’s Journal

Edition of Thursday-Friday, Dec. 18-19, 2014

To the Editor:

If you received the giant postcard from state Sen. Jim Seward’s office stating you may have “New York State Unclaimed Funds waiting for you! …There’s never any charges to search or file for unclaimed funds.” Don’t believe it. Don’t believe it.

I was surfing the Internet a while back and decided to look into that site. I put in the names of my mother and stepfather and, sure enough, their names came up saying that there were funds available.

To make a long story short I contacted my brother, since I had turned executorship over to him. He was the one that had to fill out the forms. We ended up going to the county seat and spending around $70 to get the forms needed. Also there was the money I spent in gas driving over to Sherburne and back a couple times.

The government would not tell us how much money was there until we bought and sent in the forms. I also sent a copy of my birth certificate, which it cost me $20 or $30 plus a three-month wait.

As we were getting the forms together we discovered my mother’s lawyer had never closed the estate. How is it the government did not required him to do this? He is now dead, so we would have to pay another lawyer to close the estate. There goes another $300 plus? So we sent in the paperwork we had.

They sent us a request for more documentation! At the time they told us there was a grand total of around $90! So we told him we did not want to pursue this matter any more. It was costing more money for form of proof than what we would get back. What’s the point?

So we requested a return of our documents. They have refused to return the documentation that we paid for. The documents belong to us as we paid for them. If they had any intelligence they would copy or check off receiving the documents and return the originals.

To me, it seems the whole affair was just another way for the government to get more money from us by having us purchase all these forms and documents from the government. If the documents where already part of government why did we have to purchase them again? Couldn’t they have just looked them up?

Another example of government incompetency and their lack of understanding that they are public servants. We pay their salary, they are not supposed to make life harder for us.

R. SCOTT DUNCAN
Hartwick Forest