By Mary Garrigan | South Dakota Searchlight
The Unclaimed Property Division of the South Dakota Treasurer’s Office wants to reunite more than $1 billion with its rightful owners. A little over $3,000 of it belonged to my daughter.
She knew that some of her old paychecks, refunds or other payments were floating around in the financial netherworld that is created when people, banks, government agencies and the U.S. Postal Service don’t communicate well with each other. Friends and family had often told her that hers was among the thousands of names included in the Unclaimed Property Division’s data banks.
The state treasurer likes to say that it only takes about 30 seconds to find out if your name is on the list. That’s true, but proving that the money belongs to you? Well, that can be a much more time-consuming task, particularly if your life looks anything like my daughter’s does.
As a woman of color, she was not born into white privilege or generational wealth. She wasn’t even born into a stable, loving family. The first half of her childhood was spent in the foster care system. The second half we spent dealing with the results of that. She has made plenty of bad choices in her life, but she has also survived traumas too numerous to count and deficits that would defeat less resilient people.
For many reasons, much of her adult life has been spent moving from one bad housing situation to another. Safe, affordable housing has always been a challenge for her to find or to afford. If you are couch-surfing at a friend’s house for a few weeks, subletting a spare bedroom for a few months, living in a domestic violence shelter, sleeping in your mother’s basement, or renting a motel room from week to week, it is almost impossible, many years later, to provide the South Dakota state treasurer with physical proof that you were ever at that location. Americans have become an increasingly mobile population, but people who live at or near the poverty line are often forced to be incredibly mobile, changing housing quickly and traumatically. In these situations, remembering to have your mail forwarded is simply not top of mind.
Today, my daughter is a single mother of two school-aged children. Their housing situation is stable for now, but the ill-maintained, crime-riddled Rapid City apartment complex where they live is neither safe nor, at more than $1,000 per month, especially affordable for her.
She works hard at a low-wage, physically demanding job. Her monthly income is just enough to make her ineligible for most government assistance, such as Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program benefits or rent subsidies, but too little to not need the help. Any injury, illness, child care emergency or unexpected expense can create a financial crisis and chaos in her monthly budget. There is rarely enough money to cover all basic needs, and never enough left over to get the things that she and her kids want. I am often amazed at her resilience in the face of so many obstacles.
She is, in other words, someone for whom an extra $3,000 in the bank is a really big deal. But her history with federal, state and tribal government programs has given her extremely low expectations when it comes to dealing with those agencies. Whatever the reasons she lost track of more than $3,000, it is safe to say that she never expected to see it again.
And that’s where I got involved. Between the two of us, my daughter and I contacted the owners of closed restaurants; we visited with accountants for bankrupted businesses; we called, texted and emailed former landlords and friends about rent agreements. We sifted through old paperwork for possible address connections.
Most of our attempts at reconstructing a paperwork trail of very old address connections went nowhere. One of her recovered paychecks was 10 years old, after all. Eventually, the kind people at the Unclaimed Property Division must have decided that we had connected enough dots and they took pity on us. Her check for $3,264.83 arrived last month.
It was not easy, and it took way more than 30 seconds of my time, but South Dakota Treasurer Josh Haeder’s staff was helpful and understanding of the situation. They all deserve our thanks for their patience.
But hardworking South Dakotans like my daughter deserve their funds, too, so here’s hoping that the state finds ways to make proving it easier for everyone — even those without a meddlesome mother like me with the time and tenacity to do it.
This commentary was written for South Dakota Searchlight, an online news organizaiton, by Mary Garrigan, a retired newspaper reporter.
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