Government puts more than $1B up for grabs

The government has a $1.1 billion pile of cash that it wants to offload.

The money pile is made up of cash from long-unused bank accounts, uncollected life insurance payouts, and money from shares and other investments that the owners haven’t claimed from companies.

The cash pool is held by the Australian Securities and Investments Commission (ASIC), which today launched a drive to match the money with its owners.

“Unclaimed money is transferred to the Commonwealth after it’s been unclaimed usually for seven years,” ASIC deputy chairman Peter Kell explained, adding that there was no time limit on making a claim for a share of the cash.

Last year, ASIC paid out $87 million in total to more than 16,000 people.

The financial watchdog still has more than a million records of unclaimed money, though, with the sums ranging from a few bucks to more than $1 million.

At $379 million, lost money from New South Wales makes up the biggest chunk of the $1.1 billion pool.

Victoria contributed $197 million in unclaimed cash sitting with ASIC, Queensland $112 million, Western Australia $75 million, South Australia $35 million, the ACT $15 million, Tasmania $9 million and the Northern Territory $8 million.

More info on the breakdown by state and territory is in the graphic below, which shows that a massive $319 million has gone astray in Sydney alone.

ASIC said you may find you are owned a share of this unclaimed money if you:

• moved house without letting the bank or the institution know
• haven’t made a transaction on a cheque or savings account for seven years
• stopped making payments on a life insurance policy;
• noticed that regular dividend or interest cheques have stopped coming
• were an executor of a deceased estate.

If you believe you may have be due a share of the money being held by ASIC, go to the watchdog’s MoneySmart site, where there’s a simple search option.

Once you’ve ascertained on the site that you do have money owing, if the money was from a bank or financial institution, you need to contact that company to ask it to lodge a claim with ASIC for the release of the money.

ASIC aims to process these claims within 28 days and get the money back to the company, which can then release it to you. You’ll get interest paid as far back as July 1, 2013, and won’t have to pay tax on that interest.

The government’s pool of unclaimed money is likely to continue to grow, however, because rules brought in in December 2015 forced banks and other financial institutions to turn over cash untouched for three years to ASIC, a big cut from the previous seven years. 

Have you checked whether you’re owed a share of the $1.1 billion in unclaimed cash?