State comptroller's office to offer help with unclaimed funds accounts

Long Islanders have collectively left more than $1 billion on the table, which they can search for and potentially reclaim at a pair of community festivals this month or anytime online.

The New York State Comptroller’s Office currently safeguards 51 million unclaimed funds accounts valued at $19 billion, officials said. These monies come from uncashed checks, unclaimed custodian accounts, trust funds and other sources dating back to the 1940s that are given to the state, but can be reclaimed. A single person could have multiple unclaimed funds accounts representing monies from different sources.

In Nassau County, the comptroller’s office counts 801,127 unclaimed funds accounts that total $575,618,489, according to an online map of unclaimed funds by county. In Suffolk, a total of $426,271,077 sits in 752,927 accounts.

Staffers with the comptroller’s office will attend a pair of Long Island events — the Long Island Fall Festival at Heckscher Park in Huntington from Friday through Monday and the Oyster Festival at Theodore Roosevelt Memorial Park in Oyster Bay on Oct. 19 and 20 — to help residents submit claims to receive these funds. Using tablets on-site, these officials will "help individuals, companies, nonprofits and municipalities check for unclaimed funds and get their money back to them quickly and easily," state Comptroller Thomas P. DiNapoli said in a news release.

Susan Silverman Quigley, whose Garden City firm Squigley Financial LLC offers financial, mortgage and insurance services, routinely recovers unclaimed funds for new clients. She said she often helps senior citizens retrieve funds from small accounts that went forgotten after paper statements went digital, as well as recent college graduates after they move out of their off-campus housing.

"When my kids left college and they gave up their college apartments, a check for the partial cable bill or electric bill got sent back to the apartment," Quigley said. She said these monies end up in the hands of the state because "a lot of the college kids don’t leave forwarding addresses." 

Quigley advises everyone to check the state’s online unclaimed funds system to see if they have long lost monies. She said the process typically takes about "10 clicks," a few more if the retriever is a beneficiary of a deceased party. She also advises folks to routinely update their beneficiary info with proper names and addresses so retirement, life insurance and other accounts go to the correct parties.

Also, beware of scammers, Quigley said. Reclaiming funds is a free process, but bad actors send letters offering to help people fill out paperwork in exchange for a portion of their funds.

"If you get a letter saying ‘Hey, we found unclaimed money for you, fill out this form and we’ll collect it for you,’ all you really need to do is say ‘thank you’ and go to New York State’s unclaimed funds website," Quigley said.