They held your money for 104 days and called it unclaimed. I know the sentence. It is what a government says about a dollar it did not earn, did not lose and does not intend to hurry about. Your old checking account, the insurance payout nobody told your mother about, the shares from a job you left in 2011 — the bank or the insurer or the company loses track of you, the law tells them to send it to the state, and the state puts it in a vault with a word on the door. Unclaimed. As though you had been offered it and shrugged. You were not offered anything. You were filed.
Here is the record. On Oct. 12, 2026, the co-chairs of Wisconsin’s Joint Committee on Finance, Sen. Howard Marklein and Rep. Mark Born, sent members a request from the Department of Revenue under the state’s passive-review process and gave them until Thursday, Oct. 29, to object; if nobody does, the Department of Administration says it is approved Oct. 30. The request is for six “project” positions for the unclaimed property program, authorized from Nov. 1, 2026, through Oct. 31, 2030. The analysis attached to it, by a Department of Administration budget analyst and dated Oct. 5, does the confessing for me. Holders — “generally financial institutions, insurance companies, and publicly traded corporations” — remitted $116.3 million in unclaimed property to the state in fiscal 2025-26, and “the estimated value of property in the state’s custody reached $929.8 million.” The state paid out $55.7 million in claims that year. Under Chapter 177, it says, “the department must act on a claim within 90 days of filing.” Average processing time went from 36 days in fiscal 2022-23 “to a high of 104 days in fiscal year 2025-26.” From 2016-17 to 2024-25, property remitted to the state rose 168% and claims paid to owners rose 46%, “indicating that property is being remitted to the department faster than the department can return it to owners.” The unit is six positions — one supervisor, one lead worker, four specialists — and Revenue Secretary David Casey’s own memo says that is “the same number of full-time staff the unit has had since it was moved to DOR in 2015.” The claims account closed fiscal 2025-26 with $111.7 million in it, up $51.3 million since 2020-21. And $55.6 million moved from the program into the state’s common school fund that year.
Now the defense, and it is in the same packet. The department is not asking for a dime of new spending authority; it would pay roughly $546,694 a year out of administrative spending authority that sits about $1.6 million above what the program actually spent last year. It cut its basic backlog in 2025-26 by borrowing revenue agents from tax returns, customer service and collections. Some claims are genuinely hard — wills, trusts, businesses, creditors — and those can only be done by senior staff. Casey writes, “Without additional staff, the UCP unit will not be able to effectively address the backlog of UCP claims, meaning Wisconsinites may not receive their rightful property in a timely manner.” Fine. Credit for writing it down. Then read the priority list in his memo: holder reports and payments first, then the advertising the statute requires, then the advanced claims. The money coming in gets processed first. The people trying to get it back get processed last. The state even pays contract auditors to go find more of it — a separate August report credits them with $6,333,556 “discovered and returned to Wisconsin” in a single fiscal year. Intake has a sales force. The exit has six chairs and a pile of borrowed agents. Both parties are the help: the unit has stayed at six under a Republican governor and a Democratic one, and this fix arrives by memo, approved by silence, from a committee that will never have to say yes out loud. I already know how fast the state moves when the money is going the other direction.
Deb searched the state’s unclaimed property list for the whole family last night and found $11.40 owed to Buck from a bait shop that closed in 2016. Buck says he is not filing a claim with a government that took nine years to notice it had his minnow money. Cricket laminated the printout anyway. I love them. They are seasoning.
“Unclaimed” is the alibi. The 104 days is the story. Sit with it until it confesses. A state that has room to hold $929.8 million of other people’s money, a reserve that grew by $51.3 million in five years, and auditors on contract to bring in more, but kept the same six people to give it back for a decade, has told you which direction of the pipe it considers the job. It is your money. It was always your money. The cardigan stays. Fill the notebook. Then ask, out loud, before you type your name into the search box: how long will you take, what does the law say, and who decided the vault gets more staff on the way in than on the way out?
Sources:
- Wisconsin Joint Committee on Finance, s. 16.515/16.505(2) passive review request for the Department of Revenue’s unclaimed property program (co-chairs’ memo Oct. 12, 2026; DOA analysis Oct. 5, 2026; DOR request from Secretary David Casey), review deadline Oct. 29, 2026 (PDF)
- Wisconsin Department of Revenue report to the Joint Committee on Finance on contract auditors in the Unclaimed Property program, fiscal 2026, Aug. 14, 2026 (PDF)
— Theo Ashford-Lindström
Leave a Reply