Ohio Exacerbates Expropriation of Personal Property Through New Escheatment Law
On July 1, 2025, Ohio’s Governor approved a budget bill for fiscal 2026 that codifies a permanent 10-year maximum window for Ohio residents to recover “unclaimed” property escheated to the state. In other words, unlike elsewhere in the U.S., even if you can prove you are the rightful owner of property (including stock and related cash) which was escheated to the state more than ten years ago, YOU CANNOT TAKE DELIVERY OF IT! It’s gone! The state has taken it FOREVER!
We have long argued in articles on this website that U.S. escheatment policy is greedy at best, and immoral at worst. Virtually all states now have laws requiring that assets like stock and cash which are PURPORTED to be “unclaimed” can be declared “abandoned” by the owner after just three years, and must be turned over to the state of last known address; which stock, in such case, the state promptly sells in the open market. Thus, if the shareholder, who assumed that his investment was being held safely at his broker or the transfer agent, realized it had been escheated and wanted it back – and the stock would have appreciated in the market in the time between escheatment and now – he would be “out” that appreciation. And what makes all of this especially troublesome is HOW states determine property is “abandoned” by the shareholder. Criteria include the shareholder not cashing a dividend check, or having his dividend merely reinvested in a DRIP or DSPP, or not voting a proxy, or not communicating with a transfer agent/broker representative and documenting that fact. In other words, a “passive” investor who simply wants to know his stock is being kept in safe hands could well find out in several years that those hands were anything but safe! And now Ohio has taken away FOREVER someone’s ability to exercise their legitimate claim to such property after ten years. We don’t know about you, but ten years ago seems like yesterday to us.
And a postscript to this sad story is WHY Ohio put this new law in place. Its 2026 budget earmarks $1 billion for “cultural and…major sports facilities.” The Cleveland Browns need a new $600 million stadium. The average Joe could thus be permitted associating partial funding for this use with the permanent expropriation of assets from Ohioans who had no idea they had to regularly and actively defend ownership of their property against “The State.”
Now let’s see if other states jump on this bandwagon….