This DC Woman Might Owe You Money

I recently stumbled across DC’s Unclaimed Property website, which keeps track of lost money and possessions that belong to unaware residents. I’d just paid my bills, and my next paycheck hadn’t hit yet, so it came as welcome news that I was apparently owed money from a closed bank account and an old job I’d nearly forgotten about. I entered some information to claim the funds and quickly got an email asking for proof of identity. Once that was verified, DC would mail me the checks. It felt a little like printing money.

Though I’d been vaguely aware of this website, I’d never considered how it all worked. Is there a big vault somewhere with millions of dollars in forgotten funds? So I called the city’s Unclaimed Property Unit to learn more. Laws in all 50 states and the District require financial institutions to report property to the government if it goes untouched for a certain period—DC takes checks after one to three years, depending on the type of funds.

The city’s population is relatively transient, so there’s a particularly high rate of unclaimed property. Someone might set up a savings account and forget it when they move away, for example, or fail to pick up their last paycheck from a job. On average, the Unclaimed Property Unit returns more than $30 million a year to its rightful owners. For fiscal year 2024, it was 39,000 items and accounts, totaling well over $35 million. It’s mostly small amounts, but once, an unclaimed estate worth $4.5 million was returned via the service. Can’t hurt to check!

Housed in a building in Southwest DC, the Unclaimed Property Unit is overseen by Lynn Hall, who works for the District’s Office of the Chief Financial Officer. Much of what she deals with is physical property: thousands of objects in Ziploc bags, carefully numbered and sorted, on rows and rows of shelves. Paper checks, stock certificates, insurance-payout slips—it all ends up here.

If somebody dies in DC, has no known relatives, and leaves behind a safe-deposit box of personal effects, Unclaimed Property gets involved. When there’s anything of value—even a single piece of jewelry or a coin—the unit takes the contents, makes an inventory, and calls an appraiser. If nobody claims it in a year, they auction it on a government-surplus website. Proceeds go into the owner’s account for an heir to hopefully someday claim. Anything unsold after two auction attempts stays in the Unclaimed Property vault for years as the unit continues to search for the owner. Only after a decade can items be photographed or scanned and destroyed.

Tracking down owners of forsaken money has been a passion of Hall’s for 40 years. “This is the good part of government,” she says. “It’s a consumer protection. If we didn’t have this statute, companies would never report this property. Owners would never see it.”

This article appears in the September 2025 issue of Washingtonian.

Ike Allen

Assistant Editor