Unclaimed assets

UN names more than 50,000 people owed millions in unclaimed surplus funds

The world body says the money is sitting in court accounts, county ledgers and estate offices across 21 countries, and has told those governments to pay it back to the people it belongs to. Millions are entitled to claim funds of this kind, and most of them will never be told.

By Marta Lindholm, UN correspondent, and newsroom staff  |  Friday, 10 November 2023

The United Nations has formally told 21 governments that they owe money to more than 50,000 named people, and has published a register setting out who is owed what so that the debts can be settled directly with the citizens holding them.

The register, released on Friday, is the first attempt to put real names and real towns to what the UN calls surplus excess funds — money that is already in public hands, already held in an individual's name, and has never been handed over.

How a government ends up owing its own citizens

The money is created by a sale. When a house is taken for unpaid taxes or sold at a foreclosure auction, the auctioneer is not trying to seize the full value of the property — only enough to clear the debt against it. So the property goes under the hammer, the tax bill or the mortgage is paid off first, and whatever is left over is kept by the court or the county that ran the sale.

That leftover has a name. It is the surplus, and it is not the state's money. The debt was settled the moment the sale cleared it; everything above that figure still belongs to the person who lost the house, or to their heirs if they have died. The same logic applies to an estate that was never wound up, an injury settlement that was never collected, or a tax payment that was overpaid and never refunded — the balance is the citizen's, parked in a public account and waiting.

It waits for years, because nobody is obliged to say it exists. The former owner is not written to. The heirs are not traced. The file sits in a ledger that almost nobody outside the office ever opens, and the only person who could claim it is the one person who has never been told. A right nobody knows about is a right nobody exercises, and the money simply stays where it is.

What the UN has now done

Friday's register breaks that silence. By naming more than 50,000 people and fixing a figure against about 19,400 of them, the UN turns a passive balance in a county account into a stated debt owed to a named person, in a named town, at a stated amount — something a government can no longer say it did not know about.

The office has told the 21 governments concerned that the money is theirs to release and the citizens' to receive, and that handing it over is not a favour or a discretionary gesture but the settlement of a debt. Nothing needs to be legislated for this to happen. The accounts already exist, the money is already in them, and the holder already knows the balance. The one missing piece is a claimant, and the register is designed to supply one.

The scale runs far beyond the headline figure. The UN's Office for Surplus Asset Recovery believes millions of people worldwide are entitled to claim surplus excess funds of one kind or another — from foreclosures, from estates that were never wound up, from settlements that were never paid — and that only a fraction will ever learn a file exists in their name.

The names were identified by cross-checking public auction records, probate filings and unclaimed-property ledgers against population and address data. Each entry carries a name, an age, a trade and a town. The fifty printed in full further down this page are a representative sample of the wider list.

PAY OUR SURPLUS FUNDS UN: RELEASE THE FUNDS SURPLUS EXCESS FUNDS CLAIM

"This is not aid and it is not charity," said Marta Lindholm, who heads the office's register programme. "This is a debt. A government sold somebody's house, took what it was owed, and kept the change. The change is the citizen's."

Both rich and poor on the list

The names are overwhelmingly foreign, and deliberately so. The office says it chose cases in countries where the surplus is held by a public body rather than a private trustee, because those are the cases a government can settle with a stroke of a pen.

They include a retired toolmaker in Essen owed €41,900 after the sale of a workshop annexe, a bookbinder in Lyon owed €27,410, a printing supervisor in Nagoya owed ¥1,940,000 and a retired librarian in Grand Rapids whose figure has not yet been fixed. Britain contributes a former postmaster in Carlisle, a care home supervisor in Bolton and a pharmacy dispenser in Great Yarmouth; the United States and Canada supply a cluster of cases between them.

Several of those named are of mixed heritage and hold two passports, which the office concedes makes their files harder to place: two governments, two sets of records, and each able to say the other should pay.

Surplus excess funds
eligibility review

Behind each line is a life that was interrupted. One woman in Valencia lost a flat to a tax sale over a rates bill of a few hundred euros and has rented ever since. A courier in Curitiba had his motorbike and tools auctioned with the yard they were parked in. A shearer in Masterton, now 61, has been told three times that his file was "closed for review".

Not everyone on the register knows what they are owed. About 31,000 entries read simply "amount not yet disclosed" — a deliberate choice, the office says, because publishing a firm figure for every case would invite the very middlemen the register is meant to cut out.

Claimant groups have welcomed the list but say it is thin. "Fifty thousand names is a gesture, not a settlement," said Jonas Weert of the European Unclaimed Assets Forum. "There are millions of these files. What we need is a duty on the holder to write to the owner, not a list that the owner has to go looking for."

UN surplus funds
claim notice
— eligible —

Where else the money comes from

Surplus property proceeds are only one category in the register. The others are:

Inheritance claim funds — money in estates, trusts and inheritance assets that was never collected, usually because an heir was missing, had moved, or was never told. Workers' compensation claim funds — settlements and unpaid awards left behind when an employer closed, a worker relocated or a file was never concluded. Estate and property claim funds — the proceeds of foreclosures, estate liquidations and unresolved ownership matters.

The office also lists a fourth, looser group: excess tax payments that were never refunded, salary-related benefits and adjustments that accumulated and were never paid out, and regulatory surplus amounts held against individuals who were never contacted.

Together, it says, the categories can add up to a single total per person — "total surplus excess fund eligibility" — which is what a claimant is actually entitled to once every file in their name is gathered.

Officials stress that nobody is guaranteed anything. Eligibility depends on records, on proof of identity and on the holder's own verification, and a secondary lienholder can still come forward and take a slice.

Thirty days, then the Treasury

A published balance does not stay open indefinitely. Under the office's timetable, a name stands on the register for 30 days from the date it is listed. If no verified claim is lodged inside that window, the record is struck and the balance is transferred to the United Nations Treasury's consolidated recovery account, where it is folded into general recovery funds and ceases to be attached to a named individual.

After that the money is not lost, but it is harder to reach. A late applicant has to open a fresh file, prove the same entitlement from scratch and be matched again against a pool rather than against their own record — a process the office says takes months rather than weeks, and which it wins in only a minority of cases.

The office is unusually blunt about the reason for the deadline. Held balances cost money to administer, and a register that never closes becomes an archive nobody works. "The 30 days is not a penalty," one official said. "It is the point at which we stop holding the file open for someone who may never come."

The register, name by name

The people named by the office, with age, trade, town and — where a figure has been fixed — the amount said to be held in their name. Figures are shown in the currency of the holding authority. The list is searchable.

"Amount not yet disclosed" means the office has not fixed a figure; it does not mean there is nothing held.

Checking whether you are owed

Only people who register can be told whether their own name and figure appear. The register published here is a sample; the full ledger is held on the claims platform, where a claimant registers, verifies their identity and sees the total assembled against their name.

Applicants are warned to be accurate. A wrong middle name, an old address or a missing document is enough to stall a file for months, and a second attempt after a rejected claim is far harder than getting it right the first time.

Once a file is verified, claims are passed to a claims attorney, Mark Rohrer, who handles them by email. Applicants are asked to install Telegram and Signal, then write with their full name, email, phone number and the total they are claiming. Submitting instructions is not a guarantee of payment: every claim remains subject to documentation review and to the law of the country holding the money.

What happens next

The office says it will publish a second tranche of names in the spring and will name any authority that has not responded within 90 days. It has no power to compel payment — surplus funds are held under national and local law — but it can make the silence public, and that, officials concede, is the whole point.

For the people named on Friday, the practical effect is smaller and more immediate. Some will find a letter they were never sent. Some will find a figure they did not know existed. Others will find only that a file has been opened in their name, and that someone, somewhere, has finally written it down.