KEY POINTS:
A woman has received a $38,000 windfall from a forgotten insurance policy she took out more than 20 years ago.
Eleanor Schlee of Hamilton signed up for the policy as a young professional in the 1980s and then spent several years overseas, leaving her contact address as care of her parents.
She subsequently suffered health problems and the existence of the AMP policy became overlooked in the chaos.
Ms Schlee does not dispute that AMP would have written to her when the policy matured around 2000, but by then her father was also ill and the letter was never passed on.
It was not until a private collection firm contacted her in December, offering to collect money on her behalf for a fee of 33 per cent, that she became aware there might be unclaimed funds in her name.
Then in January she heard a radio news item about Inland Revenue's $11 million "unclaimed money" list.
IRD announced it had put online its latest list of 12,000 people or entities owed $11 million.
It said most of the money came from deposits left in banks and other financial institutions and included insurance proceeds, cheques or wages.
"Lost" or unclaimed money is an ongoing issue. The online records cover the period 2005-2007 but IRD said it had records detailing more than 100,000 cases of unclaimed funds totalling $40 million since 1973.
Under the Unclaimed Money Act 1971, funds left untouched for more than six years are required to be paid to IRD.
Insurance companies, fund managers, banks and the Public Trust have all reported holding abandoned funds adding up to tens of millions of dollars.
But if you front up and claim long-lost funds, don't expect the investment to have earned you any extra - IRD said no additional interest was paid to claimants beyond what would have been earned when the money was held by an institution. The claimed funds are not subject to tax, though.
Eleanor Schlee's insurance company, AMP, said it held unclaimed funds owed to around 2 per cent of its customer base. Other financial institutions have reported similar figures.
AMP's general manager of operations, Robyn Elston, said it had recently strengthened its processes for tracking the owners of abandoned funds.
Ms Schlee has managed to prove that she is the rightful owner of the matured policy and received the funds this month, but Ms Elston admitted that after the initial letter in 2000, no further attempt would have been made to contact her.
She said AMP now tried to track missing clients six months after a policy has matured, and again after three years. Clients did not realise how critical an up-to-date address was, and the insurer had only in recent years started collecting phone numbers and email addresses.
IRD said that since the unclaimed money list went up in November, there had been 3100 claimants for funds totalling $347,569.
WHERE TO LOOK
The online list can be found at www.ird.govt.nz/unclaimed-money
BEING PENNY WISE EARNS WOMAN THOUSANDS
"I'm good with the pennies but not with the pounds," says Eleanor Schlee.
As a young vet working in Taranaki in the 1980s she was earning a reasonable salary. A partner at the time "fancied himself clever with finances" and advised her to put her spare cash into various investments.
Those investments, it now turns out, included a $37,839 AMP insurance policy, which she forgot about for many years and did not rediscover until she heard about the IRD's unclaimed money website.
"And there it was, my name, quite a bit of money. Then the story was to get it out."
She says IRD was not easy to deal with. Emails went unanswered, and the whole process took about six weeks.
She and partner John Titchener decided the money must be from an insurance policy because of the amount, but if they had not been able to tell IRD that the institution concerned was AMP they would not have been able to claim it.
It was luck Ms Schlee's name was recorded correctly, as many names are incomplete, Mr Titchener said.
The identities behind 'A R T RLK Bj Stew', 'Deadman' or 'King' may have trouble recognising themselves.
