The final paragraph of this story is interesting.

CHICAGO — A lawyer says Chicago has benefited from 22,000 uncashed checks worth $11 million, some going back to the 1980s.

The Chicago Sun-Times says attorney Clint Krislov made the discovery through a public-records request during a legal dispute between the city and retirees. He says Chicago is supposed to notify the state of Illinois if a check from the city is uncashed after three years. The state has a website for people to look for unclaimed property.

The checks include a $44,000 payment in 1991 to Commonwealth Edison. The Sun-Times apparently didn’t cash five small checks from the city.

Law department spokesman Bill McCaffrey says Chicago is not bound by the state’s unclaimed property law and has its own procedures for uncashed checks. He didn’t
elaborate.

LINK: https://wgntv.com/2019/08/22/c...ago-remain-uncashed/

quote:

Law department spokesman Bill McCaffrey says Chicago is not bound by the state’s unclaimed property law and has its own procedures for uncashed checks. He didn’t
elaborate.

I’ll bet he didn’t...

quote:

Originally posted by gearhounds:

quote:

Law department spokesman Bill McCaffrey says Chicago is not bound by the state’s unclaimed property law and has its own procedures for uncashed checks. He didn’t
elaborate.

I’ll bet he didn’t...

I think the hookers and blow go without saying.

It's not a lot of uncashed money, 40 years of records have only $11 million, in comparison to the total checks written over that time frame for a city the size of Chicago. Works out to $275K a year in uncashed checks, and it's not really unclaimed property the only issue would be if someone is taking and cashing those checks illegally that works for the city...

No, that's unclaimed property.

If any entity owes you money and you never claim that money, it is still yours. Entities are required to report that money. All 50 states have some mechanism to collect and return that money to its rightful owner.

Only very rarely is "unclaimed property" tangible property of any sort.

I worked in a state unclaimed property office and I'd be very surprised if IL's unclaimed property office doesn't have a "compliance division" whose job is specifically that: to contact all entities that do business within IL, get them to report unclaimed property, and then return that property to the owner (via some outreach mechanism or another).

We had some people who worked specifically with monies disbursed by the state and other people who dealt with private entities doing business within the state.

Whether this story is incompetence of malfeasance on the part of either IL or Chicago, I can't say, but I'd be surprised if no one in IL ever asked Chicago for their unclaimed property records.

Further developments in the uncashed checks:

https://wgntv.com/2019/08/22/c...ago-remain-uncashed/

Clinton Krislov is the lawyer who found out about the checks. He did an open records request to the city to get the information. He was working on a lawsuit for some city retirees when he found out about the uncashed checks. He said he had a hunch the city might be hiding people’s money.

State law requires property which goes unclaimed for three years be turned over to the state. The state treasurer has a website that allows residents to search for unclaimed property.

There are questions about whether the city was supposed to report these checks to the state because they remain uncashed.

Krislov has filed a class-action lawsuit to get that money back to the people who deserve it and he wants the city to pay interest. He said the city should have alerted people somehow to tell them that they had money waiting for them at city hall.

“Some of these people I’m sure have died, which is really it’s unfortunate,” he said. “The city should be transparent about this. This is money that doesn’t belong to the city. They ought to provide a way to make sure that people can find it and get it.”

A spokesperson for the city did not comment on the lawsuit.

Law department spokesman Bill McCaffrey says Chicago is not bound by the state's unclaimed property law and has its own procedures for uncashed checks. McCaffrey said in a statement:

We have not yet received this suit and therefore cannot comment on its specific claims, however, it is the City’s position that it is not subject to the Revised Uniform Unclaimed Property Act. As a home rule unit, the City has enacted ordinances and adopted procedures providing for the disposition of various forms of property, including uncashed checks, tax overpayments and water overpayments, and that authority has not been preempted.

The dead can't endorse checks, but they CAN vote.

The real interesting category would be the checks that were cashed by dead people.
I would bet many are related to politicians and government employees.

This isn’t necessarily as big and scary as it seems. It’s actually fairly normal. Most big cities have big numbers in unclaimed funds and procedures for dealing with them.

My day job put me in a position to see this process happen in Cleveland. They actually made a reasonable effort to notify people both directly and through ads. The whole process was validated by the state auditors office as well as the counties auditor. Also, any money that was ultimately not claimed was returned to the general fund, not to the agencies that had collected it, so it wasn’t some stealth way to pad the budget of certain agencies.

Sure, Chicago could be different, but this is actually a pretty routine problem and every major city (and even minor ones) deal with it to some extent.

- Bret

Wrong information on file, moved, died, divorced, misplaced, lost in mail, thrown out by mistake, there are all kinds of reasons for checks not getting cashed.

Wonder if the attorney that found it will get 40%...

I'm curious as to why the City, and perhaps other .Gov's, are not subject to the States Unclaimed Property law like all the rest of us are. That makes no sense to me.

Anybody have any insight on that?

quote:

Anybody have any insight on that?

Because it is Chicago. Sometime back John Kass a bold reporter for the Chicago Tribune asked readers to send him the names of those people who had NO SHOW jobs at City Hall. The list was quite long. For the uninitiated, those are jobs for which you are paid a salary and seldom have to report for work. PATRONAGE is the Chicago way.

quote:

Originally posted by Sailor1911:
I'm curious as to why the City, and perhaps other .Gov's, are not subject to the States Unclaimed Property law like all the rest of us are. That makes no sense to me.

Anybody have any insight on that?

I can’t say why Chicago as a whole would be exempt, but I can say that the courts are often not subject to the same rules as the executive branch agencies. There is some separation of powers stuff that results in courts making their own procedures for some things which are dictated to the executive branch by the legislative branch. How they deal with unclaimed funds can be one of those situations where the court can have different rules than the governors office. That doesn’t usually mean they can keep the money or spend it, but can make their own procedures for what a reasonable effort is to return funds is, or how long they want to wait before getting it off their books.

The claim that the whole city is exempt from the rules for handling unclaimed funds seems unlikely.

- Bret