"We don't have unclaimed property" is a red flag

Most companies believe they have no unclaimed property. Samantha Petersen says that belief is usually the evidence that they do.

The exposure rarely appears on the books, because writing uncashed checks and credit balances off to income has been standard practice at many companies for decades. The liability does not disappear with the entry. For public companies it can sit inside the financial statements as an undisclosed loss contingency, and in an acquisition it transfers straight to the buyer.

Samantha has spent over 30 years in unclaimed property compliance. She is a certified fraud examiner, founder of the Petersen Group, and a former KPMG practice leader. She joins AssetFynd CMO Shaun Jackson to explain where the exposure hides and what to do when a state comes looking.

What is Fynders Keepers?

Hundreds of billions in lost financial assets are sitting unclaimed around the world. Dormant bank accounts, insurance policies, brokerage accounts, uncashed checks, forgotten estate assets. Money that was never collected because nobody knew it existed or where to find it. These unclaimed assets are collected and held by hundreds of governments and institutions across the world, waiting for someone to claim them.
Fynders Keepers brings together the leading unclaimed property experts and practitioners from law, finance, compliance, corporate restructuring, banking, asset tracing and claiming, genealogy research, international heir finding and wills & estates to share practical insights and real stories from the people doing the work.
Each episode features candid technical, and occasionally surprising conversations about the mechanics and challenges of locating and recovering lost assets, jurisdictional and cross border obstacles, ownership puzzles, the cases that took years, and the recoveries worth remembering.
Brought to you by AssetFynd.