Wisconsin is tied for first place among states when it comes to reconnecting unclaimed money with its rightful owners, according to a journalist who now focuses on the matter — but that doesn’t mean the state is very good at it, he warns: No state is.
“The reality is that the claim rates, both in Wisconsin and in other parts of the country, are terrible,” said Mark Lewyn. “They really don’t return much in the grand scheme of things, and Wisconsin is really no exception to that.”
It’s not just Lewyn: Wisconsin’s treasurer — who has limited jurisdiction over unclaimed property, such as forgotten refunds or abandoned bank accounts — said that the state receives claims for only one of every two unclaimed property dollars it acquires.
Lewyn, a former correspondent for BusinessWeek and USA Today, now runs unclaimedmoneyguy.com, which offers statistics and other information on what he estimates is more than $113 billion in unclaimed property held by states, as well as connecting visitors to individual state governments’ property claim sites.
He said he took up the issue when he reclaimed $250 of his own money back from his home state of Virginia. He doesn’t charge users for anything on the site, but he earns advertising revenue through it.
Lewyn’s site collects data from all 50 states and ranks them on a five-star scale according to processing speed, return rate and transparency among other criteria. He gave Wisconsin five stars for “proactive notification” and four stars in all other categories.
Wisconsin’s overall score of 4.2 stars put it as tied for first place with Rhode Island, according to the site’s methodology.
Unclaimed property means money left untouched by its rightful owner for some legally specified period, which varies by state and type of property, after a business loses contact with that owner. Examples include forgotten bank accounts, uncashed paychecks, or the contents of safe deposit boxes.
The state does not become the owner of these funds, only the custodian, meaning the money still rightfully belongs to its original owners. The money can be reclaimed at any time. It’s states rather than the federal government that assume custodianship — a process called “escheatment” that dates to medieval English law — because responsibility was never delegated to the federal government in the Constitution. The Tenth Amendment, then, means it’s up to states to care for the property.
State Treasurer John Leiber said Wisconsin is holding $800 million in unclaimed property. Much of it is in minor amounts under $10, but sometimes it’s more, such as when the University of Wisconsin System tracked down $144,000 that had been erroneously sent to “University of Madison.” Some of these unclaimed amounts even go into the millions, he said.
In the fiscal year just ended, the unclaimed property fund took charge of about $118 million, paid out about $40 million in claims and generated about $5 million in interest, Leiber said.
Lewyn contends states have an interest in not returning the money. If rightful owners reclaim more of it, then states earn less interest on it — interest they get to keep.
“On one hand, for political purposes, they want to make a big deal about returning money, but on the other hand, they don’t want to return too much because as long as people don’t claim it, they can use it for whatever they want to use it for.”
“That’s not just a Wisconsin problem, that’s a problem in literally every other state in the country,” he added.
Wisconsin’s interest on unclaimed property goes toward the Common School Fund, which sends money to school districts as library aid — about $70 million of it in fiscal 2025.
Leiber agreed that the state could be doing more to return unclaimed property to owners, but in a series of steps during the 1990s through 2013, the Legislature shifted most powers out of the treasurer’s office. The unclaimed property program is now administered by the Department of Revenue.
“My job is only to promote it, except they haven’t given me any budget to promote it or the staff to promote it, so that kind of limits how much promotion I can do,” he said.
One obstacle, he said, is a requirement that the state place yearly advertisements in a newspaper. “The classified section is not really where people get their information anymore,” Leiber said. He said the Department of Revenue has had some success with online ads promoting its search website.
Lewyn has been drawing attention to states’ low return rate with essays in news outlets, including several in Wisconsin. A spokeswoman for the Department of Revenue pushed back in a written statement to the Badger Institute.
“Wisconsin is recognized as a leader in this space, and as the author pointed out, Wisconsin DOR has built one of the better automatic match systems in the country,” wrote the state Department of Revenue’s Jennifer Bacon. In the fiscal year that ended June 30, the agency “returned over $6.4 million worth of unclaimed property to 33,421 customers to rightful owners through auto matching. We approved more than 35,000 claims manually totaling over $43.5 million returned to the rightful owner in FY 2026.”
“Because fraudsters are becoming increasingly sophisticated, DOR has added additional fraud prevention measures to the program,” Bacon said. “The Department of Revenue requested additional resources in the last budget,” but she faulted lawmakers for not providing it.
Badger Institute sought comment from the offices of members of the Joint Finance Committee, which did not respond by this story’s publication.
Leiber encouraged Wisconsinites to search the Department of Revenue’s site using common misspellings of their name, which can sometimes account for funds that never get delivered to their intended recipient. He suggested making a yearly habit of checking the state’s unclaimed property site.
“It’s your money, it’s the public’s money,” he said. “We want to give it back, but we have to find you first.”
Jackson Walker is a native Wisconsinite and a Michigan-based journalist.
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