| Treasury Hunt! | |
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Treasury Hunt! -- A Web site where you can sort of wander around the U.S. Treasury looking for forgotten money. You will try this. You know you will.
Freshly opened this February, the Treasury Hunt Web site provides an easy way for people to find out if they have matured U.S. savings bonds, or undeliverable bonds or interest payments. The entire process is protected by heavy encryption and a personal follow-up process assures information is disclosed only to the actual owners of the bonds.
How do you forget a bond? Easily. A young you gets the bond as a gift. "Oh, whoopee," you think, "in 30 years, this thing will be worth something," and stick the bond in a drawer. Thirty years later, your head is full of kids and cars and mortgages and ... everything, except that now very "worth something" bond. Or, maybe you inherited some bonds years ago, but never received them.
In
fact, over 15,000 savings bonds and 2,000 interest payments a year are returned
to the Treasury as undeliverable. All together, over 20 million savings bonds
worth over over $8 billion have matured and can be redeemed. "Treasury Hunt is one more step in our effort to encourage owners of
savings bonds that have stopped earning interest to redeem them and put their
money back to work," said Van Zeck, Commissioner of the Bureau
of Public Debt, in a Treasury press release, "The new Web site will also help us in our efforts to get bonds and savings
bond interest payments reunited with their rightful owners." At
least 160,000 such forgotten or "undeliverable" bonds are out there,
just waiting for their owners to redeem them for cash. When it opened on Feb. 5,
2001, the Treasury Hunt database contained about 35,000 records, but more are
added every day. Searching Treasury Hunt is easy. After clicking on the
"Start Search" button, you will be prompted for information such as name, city
and state and in some cases Social Security Number. If there is a possible
match, the customer is given instructions for following up. The site is
available 24 hours a day, seven days a week. Searching Tips: Be sure to use the name
and address information under which the bond would have been purchased. Also,
try variations of your name, just in case a spelling mistake was made. Finally,
you do not need to enter all the information requested on the form. Just fill in
what you know. Savings bonds become undeliverable and
are sent to Public Debt only after financial institution issuing agents or the
Federal Reserve make several attempts at delivering the bonds to investors.
Bonds returned as undeliverable are a tiny fraction of the 45 million bonds sold
each year.
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