By KEN CARPENTER
Great Bend Post
Lynn Rogers, the Kansas State Treasurer, came to Great Bend to tell local residents the state may have unclaimed property that is rightfully theirs. Rogers greeted customers at Great Bend Coffee during the lunch hour on Friday. After putting their names into a state database, he was able to tell them if they had money coming to them.
Rogers explained how the state got the money in the first place.
"It’s money that gets turned back to us,” Rogers said. “It could be an old rent deposit, a utility deposit. Sometimes it’s a final paycheck, checking accounts or savings accounts that have been abandoned, utility deposits. Also, we see a lot of oil and gas lease payments that get misdirected.”
The State of Kansas is holding more than $400 million that is unclaimed. Another $35 to $40 million comes in each year. Rogers said some of the unclaimed money goes back as far as 1980. He remembers one case that paid off for a Kansas woman’s heirs.
"We came across a lady who had died in Council Grove,” Rogers recounted. “She left most of it to her church and to a couple of nieces and nephews. We were able to track down the attorney, and he had retired actually, but he reopened the estate so that he could claim that. It was about $180,000.”
Rogers noted that claiming property from the state is free. You can find out if you have unclaimed property by going to kansascash.ks.gov.
Great Bend residents have almost 16,000 unclaimed property claims totaling more than $2 million according to the Treasurer’s Office.
Since the beginning of the year, the Unclaimed Property Division has returned over $10 million in property to Kansans with an average claim of about $200.