Do you have unclaimed money or property in the state’s vault?

Tuesday was second National Unclaimed Property Day

Tucked away in the Colorado Capitol sits a vault of unclaimed property that includes such curios as a souvenir hatchet from George Washington’s inauguration, military medals, a 6.5-carat canary-yellow diamond ring and two silver bars waiting to be claimed.

The items are among about 5 million pieces of unclaimed property that employees of the state Treasury Department’s Unclaimed Property Division hope to reunite with Coloradans through the program known as the Great Colorado Payback, state Treasurer Dave Young said.

Tuesday marked the second National Unclaimed Property Day, and Young said an estimated one in 10 people has unclaimed property held by the state.

“Clearly, we have lots of unclaimed property and our mission is to reunite people with that unclaimed property,” Young said.

He encouraged people to visit colorado.findyourunclaimedproperty.com to find out if any unclaimed property is waiting for them.

Businesses, nonprofit organizations and other groups can also have unclaimed property, as there are more than 1.7 million names of individuals and businesses for whom property is available listed on the division’s website.

Most of the property is money, Young said, but some of the rare items the division has received — including a $500 bill, emerald jewels, international coins and vintage baseball cards — came from safe deposit boxes.

Safe deposit boxes are transferred to the state after the owners haven’t paid any fees on them for five years and the bank cannot locate the owners, unclaimed property director Bianca Gardelli said.

“Usually someone stopped paying because they passed. It’s very common,” Gardelli said.

Once the state receives the safe deposit box contents, employees of the unclaimed property division begin their own search for the rightful owners of the property.

For the past few years, the division has sent notifications including emails, postcards and letters to potential property owners of unclaimed items. These notifica

tions contain a property ID number to make it easier to track the property on the division’s website — and to ensure the recipients know that the notification is not fraudulent, Gardelli said.

Some efforts to reunite owners with their property have been unsuccessful, such as in the case of the canary-yellow diamond ring, which the division has held since 2002. But in the last fiscal year, about $43 million was returned to 23,462 claimants, state officials said. Returned safe deposit items were not valued in that total.

“None of these are valued at all, unless we actually go to auction,” Gardelli said about the rare safe deposit items.

The state hasn’t held a large auction since 1998, Gardelli said, but the division has sold a few items through ebay when the items’ owners were unknown.

Money earned from these sales will not roll over to the state’s general fund unless it has been determined through a legal process that there will not be anyone to come forward and claim the property, Gardelli said — and that’s rare. Instead, the earnings are typically put into a bank account that will be held indefinitely by the state for a person to eventually claim.

The division is considering hosting an auction in the future, Gardelli said, but because of COVID-19, the division is still catching up on its inventory. “So we’ve been really working on getting it organized and determining what we have in there,” Gardelli said about the vault.

Any items that have had previous claims placed on them, as well as rare and sentimental items, will never be put up for auction, Gardelli said.

Holding items of sentimental value is important, Young said, because the value of an item for a person can exceed monetary value.

For example, Gardelli said it’s common for the division to receive silver certificate dollar bills. One time, a woman came to claim the content of her father’s safe deposit box, and in the box was a $1 bill that Gardelli described as “literally black.”

“I pull out this dollar bill, and she’s like, ‘That’s where it is,’” Gardelli chuckled. “And she’s like, ‘My dad used to work as a farmer and he carried that dollar bill every day in his pocket and we didn’t know where it went.’

“So even if it’s such a simple thing, you don’t know what it was to the family.”

Young recalled a story of a woman who had stored money in a coffee can in her kitchen without her family knowing. When it was full, she would put it in a savings account, but didn’t tell the bank who the heirs were. After she died and the money was transferred to the unclaimed property division, Gardelli found the three siblings who were the heirs to the savings account that by then totaled $250,000.

“Not everybody’s got $250,000 waiting in unclaimed property, but most of it’s money and you never know until you actually file a claim and see,” Young said.

If a person has a relatively small amount of money in unclaimed property, their claim can be approved electronically, Gardelli said, adding that the division was able to auto-approve about 700 claims on Monday.

The number of claims being approved increases each year, Gardelli said, which is positive because the vault is getting too full. She said she doesn’t want to auction any safe deposit box items because those things belong to people. But if items are not collected, they will have to be auctioned eventually.

“We need people to come forward and collect their family’s items,” Gardelli said.