Recently, the New York branch of Bank of China made an announcement to request a group of New York Chinese customers to withdraw money from their long inactive saving accounts. If they fail to do so, the bank, under the Abandoned Property Law, will transfer these unclaimed, inactive accounts to the New York State government. This announcement stirred many discussions in the Chinatown community. Many Chinese residents had started to research their accounts in order to avoid having their assets transferred elsewhere.

Deng Bao Lee, the manager at the New York City branch of Bank of China, explained that the bank selected from its computer system all the accounts that had more than $50 and had been inactive for the past five years. The bank will send this unclaimed property report to New York State Controller Thomas DiNapoli. It will then remind the customers to take out the money before the bank transfers the money to the state government.

Many banks operated in New York State would organize their data annually. However, it is up to the bank to choose which publication and in what language to make the announcement. Some banks placed ads in English-language newspapers, which did not reach some Chinese-speaking customers. The Bank of China, however, first sent a letter to its customers and then made the announcement in several Chinese newspapers, in order to make sure that Chinese customers would all get the information.

According to Lee, some customers might have used other people’s addresses to open a bank account, and others may have moved out of New York. Some customers might be short-term visitors and professionals who returned to China to work. If they don’t know about the action to be taken on long inactive bank accounts, they may lose their assets.

After reading the announcement from Bank of China, many members of the Fujianese community said that about half of those customers lived in Chinatown’s Allen Street, Henry Street, and 8th Ave in Brooklyn, where there are large numbers of new immigrants. Among them, many might have been deported because of their immigrant status, and so their accounts had become inactive.

In the past, Abacus Bank helped undocumented Chinese immigrants who were to be deported to manage their accounts by helping their customers to authorize their relatives in the United States to manage their accounts and security boxes. Other banks also dealt with undocumented customers when immigration officers accompanied them to the bank to close the accounts or to authorize others to manage their accounts. However, in the past two years, the Immigration authorities have sped up the deportation process, leaving little or no time to take care of their bank accounts; this has led to the problems of inactive accounts.

Lee assures these customers that they need not worry about losing rights to their assets, because these accounts are simply transferred to the New York State government. Their assets will remain intact and the state government will pay interest on the money. In order to claim their assets, customers will need to go through some paperwork.

New York State passed the Abandoned Property Law in August of 2004. It requested insurance companies, banks and other financial institutions to transfer all the inactive, unclaimed funds to the state government’s abandoned property fund. Currently, New York State had several billions in the fund, but the law did not designate clearly how unclaimed funds will be used.