BRG employees surprised with unclaimed property checks
The following information was provided by the Louisiana Department of Treasury.
BATON ROUGE, La. (WAFB) - To celebrate National Unclaimed Property Day, State Treasurer John M. Schroder launched the Great Employee Give Back of 2023, a pilot program with Baton Rouge General, by handing out 572 unclaimed property checks totaling more than $42,000 to employees of the Baton Rouge General on Wednesday (Feb. 1) afternoon.
“Giving away unclaimed property checks is absolutely my favorite part of my job,” said Schroder. “I commend CFO Kendall Johnson and his staff for being so easy to work with on this initiative, and I hope other businesses and organizations follow suit to try and connect their employees with any lost money they may have in our system.”
The Great Employee Give Back of 2023 offers employers the opportunity to provide data, including current addresses, and our Unclaimed Property team will match the information against our records. If we find a match, the employee can easily claim their money. In many cases, we can issue checks without any action from the employee.
The Great Employee Give Back project began as a pilot program with BRG which has more than 4,000 employees. After the health system received a check of its own at the end of 2022, leaders started thinking about how to do the same for their team members.
“We sent the Unclaimed Property team a list of our employees a couple of weeks ago,” said BRG’s Chief Financial Officer Kendall Johnson. “Now they’re hand delivering checks. It really couldn’t be any easier.”
“The Louisiana Department of Treasury has more than $1 billion of money in the Unclaimed Property Program waiting to be claimed,” said Schroder. “We are always looking for data sources that contain current addresses and we realize that employers should have that information for their employees. We get in new money all the time, and our team is constantly trying to find new ways to connect people with their lost or forgotten money.”
One in six Louisianans have money in Louisiana’s Unclaimed Property Program, with the average claim being around $900. For more information on how the program works, please contact Unclaimed Property Director Kathleen Lobell at klobell@treasury.la.gov.
To learn more about the Louisiana Department of Treasury’s Unclaimed Property Program, visit LaCashClaim.org, or call 888-925-4127 Monday through Friday from 8 a.m. until 4:30 p.m.
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