Auditor: Great Colorado Payback plagued with issues

The Great Colorado Payback, which seeks to reunite Coloradans with their forgotten property, isn’t working the way it should, according a report released Monday by the state Auditor’s Office.

Key findings from the 60-page report:

•Nearly half the claims the auditor tested weren’t acted upon within the 90 days required by the Unclaimed Property Act.

• The division hasn’t mailed notifications to about 1.6 million people about their unclaimed property since March 2005 even though that’s also required by law.

• The auditor’s office determined that 91 percent of the unclaimed property records it received were duplicate, incomplete, inaccurate or questionable.

• Treasury accounting staff recorded claims and interest distributions incorrectly and haven’t determined the amount of the error or made any necessary adjustments.

The Great Colorado Payback started in 1987 as a way to tell Coloradans about all the unclaimed property the state is legally required to keep, such as forgotten bank account balances, deposits to utility companies and even unused gift cards.

Most people didn’t know the state held onto all this stuff until the treasurer’s office starting running television ads in the early 2000s and the number of annual claims tripled. The backlog of unprocessed claims grew to more than 12,000 — almost as many as the division receives in a calendar year.

“We agreed with all the recommendations in the report,” said Dave Young, the Democratic treasurer who took office in January. “We have been moving rapidly to change the course of the work in the office.”

For example, he said the unclaimed property team has essentially worked double time to knock down the backlog down to 2,200 claims — a success noted by the auditor’s office in its report.

And a bill passed during the 2019 legislative session allowed Young’s staff to finally start notifying people about their potential unclaimed property by email.

“It seems odd that we were only finally getting to email this year,” Young said, adding that the division stopped issuing those mail notifications because so many of them were returned as undeliverable.

The previous treasurer, Republican Walker Stapleton, told The Denver Post in August 2018 that the division was understaffed and relied on an antiquated system for processing claims. He’d wanted to upgrade to email notifications as well.

The State Auditor’s Office reviewed records of claims created from May 2017 through the first three months of Young’s administration and found “vast differences in the amount of time it took for the division to act on the claims.” Some were processed the same day, but 106 of them took close to 2 years.

The report lays the blame on a lack of adequate internal controls.

“I know that these concerns are there,” Young said.

“I think there is pretty strong evidence that we’re making good progress towards righting the ship.”