Universities Have Abandoned More Than $1 Million of Property in Texas

11/29/2024

Screenshot of the excel spreadsheet I made

Background: What is Unclaimed Property?

If someone cuts you a cashier's check for $100 and sends it to you in the mail, and the mail truck catches fire… what happens to the $100?

In the United States, what happens is that eventually the bank which guarantees the cashier's check will turn the value of that check over to the custody of the state government. From the Texas Comptroller’s Office:

What is Unclaimed Property?

Since 1963, Texas has required institutions, businesses and governmental entities to report to the state any personal property that has been unclaimed for up to five years, depending on the property in question.

Unclaimed property can be abandoned assets. Some examples:

dividend, payroll or cashier's checks

stocks, bonds or mutual fund accounts

utility deposits and other refunds

bank accounts and safe deposit box contents

insurance proceeds

mineral interest or royalty payments

court deposits, trust funds or escrow accounts

overpayments on insurance, utilities and other bills

So if you have a bank account in the state of Texas and leave it untouched for a few years, when it eventually gets closed down the bank will send whatever's left in to the Texas Comptroller’s office for safe-keeping. Every state handles these claims slightly differently, but nearly all of them have a website set up like Texas’ www.claimittexas.gov where you can search your surname or business name for any property you’re owed.

I learned about this myself just a few weeks ago in Professor Quintanilla’s Business Law class at the University of Texas (amazing professor by the way, shoutout to Prof Q). At the end of our class on property law he had us search for property in our name as an exercise. He told us that every semester somebody always finds some astonishing amount of money under their name. Plenty of people find $25, sometimes they find a couple hundred. One semester he even had a student find $80,000 which belonged to her late father-in-law! After I learned that, I spent around an hour a day searching through the website to see what I could find. I searched family members, friends, colleagues - everyone I could think of. So far I’ve uncovered a few thousand dollars for the folks in my life. I found myself wishing that I could get everyone’s attention all at once and ask them to search for themselves instead of having to look on my own. Hopefully that’s what I’ve done with this article.

So? Tell me about the “$1 MILLION” from that flashy headline.

When you search “University of Texas” on www.claimittexas.gov, you’re immediately greeted with a page full of items with values of more than $100. When I saw that one of the first results was an item worth $15,000, I nearly fell out of my chair! But that $15k is the least of it… all in all, the University of Texas System has nearly $300,000 in unclaimed property once you add up all their unclaimed items.

But it’s not just UT. Searching through the data, I was able to find over $1 Million waiting to be claimed from the State of Texas by various universities both within and outside Texas. This includes some big ticket items like one claim worth $31,457.45 for Rice University which has been waiting since 2006, a claim of $39,313.98 for the University of North Texas, or $21,698.98 for the University of Washington. To be clear, while those are particularly large individual unclaimed items, each of those universities has even MORE money waiting to be claimed in smaller items as well. At last count, my dataset had over 600 different unclaimed items worth $100 or less.

I’ve attached my (very limited) dataset here if you’d like to take a look for yourself, or go to www.claimittexas.gov and take a look at the source yourself.

Why should I care, what does this mean for me?

Rice University left a single item worth around $30,000 untouched for almost two decades. Even before we adjust for inflation, $30,000 is more money than plenty of Texans make in a year. The UT System has nearly $300,000 lying around - well over what an out-of-state student would pay in tuition over 4 years. You might be asking yourself: how is it not gross financial mismanagement for large universities to leave that much money on the table?

Well, the annual budget of University of Texas at Austin is roughly $4 billion. That’s UT Austin alone, not including the 15 other entities within the UT System which have their own budgets in the hundreds of millions or billions of dollars. In institutions this large - one million dollars is something you might find in between the couch cushions. It should still be accounted for and recovered, of course, but nothing about this constitutes misconduct or anything more than a curiosity.

The purpose of this article is not to criticize Universities for leaving this money on the table or the system that we have in Texas for caching unclaimed property. As easy as it would be to write eye-catching “gotchas” about “incompetent nonprofits” or “wasteful government”, nobody’s really done anything wrong here. As a current student of UT Austin, I certainly hope they claim the money they’re owed and put it towards some good use. But I could have just emailed their accounting office if I wanted to get that done. Why the flashy headline, then?

I wrote this article because I want YOU, dear reader, to get the money you’re owed. Go to your state’s unclaimed property website (either by googling “Unclaimed property [my state], or just visiting claimittexas.gov if you live in Texas) and search your name.

Search your surname, search your friend’s name, search your mother’s maiden name, and search the name of the business your late father-in-law used to own. That neighbor across the street from you who just lost his job and could really use a lucky break right now? Search his name.

Seriously - stop reading and go check! You never know what you’ll find. You might just find something that perks your day up a bit. You might find something that saves your whole year. Again, that’s claimittexas.gov, or just google your state’s name and “unclaimed property”.

I know this sounds nuts, and trust me: I feel nuts writing this. “The government is going to give you free money” is hard to say with a straight face. But the fact is it’s not free money. It’s money you’re already owed. Go out there and get it back!