U.K. Prime Minister David Cameron announced plans to use “hundreds of millions of pounds” from dormant bank accounts to fund community projects, while Business Secretary Vince Cable said lenders “ripped off” customers.
Cameron said he will press ahead with a proposal set out in the coalition government’s program to establish a “Big Society Bank” to finance moves by charitable groups and not-for-profit companies to take over jobs currently done by the government.
“These unclaimed assets, alongside the private-sector investment that we will leverage, will mean that the Big Society Bank will over time make available hundreds of millions of pounds of new finance to some of the most dynamic social organizations in our country,” Cameron said in a speech in Liverpool, northwest England, today.
Let’s say there is a rumor that my great great grandfather buried an “unclaimed” large quantity of gold bullion on my farm.
Does that give the government the right to ‘come in’ and state that it has the ‘authority’ to dig up every square foot of my farm until it finds the gold bullion and then put that gold bullion ‘to its own use’ for any length of time whatsoever? This is a particularly appropriate question if I am uninformed of the state’s actions.
The state of California already does this – if there has been no activity on a bank account for three years, the state sends out a notice to the last known address of the account holder (although it has been documented that they often don’t try too hard or follow through with information they have). If they do not hear back, they take whatever is in the account or bank box (one woman had her jewelry taken, even though the bank had her current address) – the state controller’s office calls it “transferring.” It’s already here, folks.
NY does the same thing, but without notifying the last known address – at least they didn’t notify me when they took some stock from an account that lay dormant for many years.