TULSA, Okla — Oklahoma's State Treasurer's Office holds more than a billion dollars in unclaimed property in its vaults.
These include rare and commemorative coins, sacks of cash, bars of silver, jewelry, and even collectible trading cards. All of it waits for the rightful owners to fill out the paperwork to claim it. Paperwork that begins with a click on the State Treasurer's website.
Early last year, Robert Walsh clicked. He looked up his name and found two items.
"One of them was for a dollar so I told 'em I'm gonna let the state keep that one," he said. "The other one was for like $3,900."
Money from his late mother's estate. She passed away in 2012.
"It was like two cashier's checks from the Bank of the Lakes," Walsh said.
His parents had accounts there. But, between the time of their deaths and when Walsh saw the unclaimed checks on the Treasurer's website, the bank had gone out of business. The bank that took over purged its older records. Since Walsh never had accounts at Bank of the Lakes, the Treasurer's Office wanted something showing his parents connection to that bank, but without the old records he couldn't provide it.
Walsh said, "I was getting really frustrated."
He tells 2 News his attorney had notes indicating the connection, but initially, that wasn't enough for the Treasurer's Office to release the money to him, so he called the Problem Solvers to see if we could help.
"You got me in contact with the deputy director," Welsh said.
A week later, the Unclaimed Property Division got in touch with him again to say, "We're gonna pay you that unclaimed property." It now accepted his attorney's affidavit. But, with a provision.
A solution has been reached as far as accepting a superior document of ownership could not be produced. We are able to move forward with paying the claim under an Affidavit of Indemnity. This promises Mr. Walsh will pay back the funds if a superior claim is made to the property.
Usually, it only takes two weeks to a month for the Unclaimed Property to establish a rightful ownership.
Walsh's claims took longer because the Treasurer's Office has to carefully vet claimants because there are a lot of fraudsters out there trying to use common names to claim property and cash.
"There's people out there that their full time business is fraud," said State Treasurer, Todd Russ. "They kinda figured out how to game the system — so we have to work pretty hard to verify who that is and somethings that can take a little bit of time and it gets frustrating for claimants."
The end goal is not to keep folks from claiming what's rightfully theirs, but to stop false claims from getting by the vetting process, which in the end is letting Walsh ring in the New Year with the checks now in his bank.
Contact the Problem Solvers:
- 918-748-1502
- problemsolvers@kjrh.com
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