Two sections reproduced from “Herb Morgan Will Fix It” in the campaign’s unclaimed-property white paper. The first-person commitments below are Herb Morgan’s proposals; the estimates and preliminary findings retain the qualifications in the paper.
Make Claims Easier for Owners and Heirs
I will remove unnecessary paperwork, expand online document submission, and make electronic processing easier to use. Automated checks should expedite straightforward claims and flag suspected fraud, with staff available to resolve complicated estates and ownership questions.
Controller Betty Yee raised the paperless eClaim limit from $1,000 to $5,000 in November 2015.[28] I propose a $10,000 limit for qualifying claims, paired with improved identity and ownership checks.
We estimate that raising the eClaim limit from $5,000 to $10,000 could return many additional single-owner cash accounts.
Potential reach: about 98,000 additional accounts, worth about $678 million.
Fix Records That Keep Owners From Finding Their Property
Misspelled names, swapped fields and unusable addresses can stand between a family and its property. I will apply Radical Transparency methods to find errors, correct verified mistakes and return unresolved problems to reporting institutions for review. Corrections will be traceable, and uncertain matches will receive human review.
- About 5.26 million properties, worth roughly $1.82 billion, have basic ZIP-code or related address defects. Each property is counted once in this total, even if it has multiple defects.
- These include about 1.81 million records without ZIP codes and 3.49 million with all-zero ZIP codes, plus incomplete codes, state mismatches, and foreign addresses classified as domestic.
- About 2.24 million affected properties, worth roughly $1.77 billion, are at or above the $50 mailed-notice threshold.
- The 2015 LAO report identified at least 18 spelling variations of “San Bernardino.”[3] As of September 2026, roughly 24,000 records contain misspellings of San Bernardino, spanning more than 500 distinct variations.
These are preliminary data-quality findings, not proof that every affected owner missed a notice. I will publish the definitions and validation methods alongside the results.
I will make error detection part of routine reporting and measure whether corrections help owners find and recover their property. The goal is simple: fewer obstacles, faster returns, and an office accountable to the people whose property it holds.
References from the full paper
Original reference numbers are retained. The campaign’s estimates and preliminary data analysis are presented in the excerpt above; the external references below support the historical eClaim threshold and the cited LAO example.
- [3] Legislative Analyst’s Office, 2015
2015 review: custodial program goals, checking-account dormancy history, 2003 interest change, and historical collections versus returns.
- [28] Controller Yee · eClaim expansion, November 5, 2015
Raised the paperless claim threshold from $1,000 to $5,000.