Treasurer wants to reunite $16.7 billion in unclaimed Savings Bonds with their owners

Rick Steelhammer
The Charleston Gazette, W Virginia – 23/07/09

Putting $16.7 billion worth of unclaimed U.S. Savings Bonds in the hands of their owners "would be a stimulus package of its own," as well as the right thing to do, according to  State Treasurer John Perdue.

That's why he and other state treasurers are lobbying Congress to support a bill, introduced by U.S. Sen. Jay Rockefeller, requiring the U.S. Bureau of Public Debt, headquartered in Parkersburg, to release the records of matured savings bonds in a searchable format.

The records would then be digitized and made available to state treasurers and other state agencies that administer unclaimed property programs, to include in their long-established outreach programs.

About $114 million worth of unclaimed savings bonds is believed owed to West Virginia residents and their heirs.

The federal government holds about 40 million unclaimed savings bonds in varying denominations, but has done little to reunite them with their owners or the owners' heirs, according to Perdue.

Most of the unclaimed savings bonds are Series E bonds, first issued in 1941 and beginning to mature in 1981. When those bonds were sold, the Bureau of Public Debt collected the names and addresses of bond owners on cards that were later converted to microfilm records.

Today, much of the contact information for the unclaimed bonds is buried within 5 billion microfilm issuance records. To research a name, those records would have to be examined one by one, using records that are not indexed and difficult to access.

Once the records are available in a digital format, "We believe we can start finding the owners and their heirs fairly easily with the technology that's available to us," Perdue said. "Here in West Virginia, we've returned  $100 million in previously unclaimed property," including lost bank accounts, insurance policies, stock certificates and other valuables.

"All the state treasurers have signed on to try to return these funds to their rightful owners," Perdue said. "We've been lobbying Congress and we have a working group that gets together on this every week with a conference call. We started on this in 2005, when I was president of the National Association of State Treasurers.

"We've finally got the Senate's attention," he said. "We've got bipartisan support and I think we're about to get a majority of senators to sign on."

Perdue said servicemen and their relatives bought many of the unclaimed Series E bonds to help finance the war effort and save for their children's education.

"This is their money, not the federal government's," he said. "We need to help them get it back."