BackgroundOptional. Use this page only if escheatment is new to you. The project guide, the counsel memo and the data are what the graded work depends on.
Project 2 asks you to work out what Silicone Motors owes the states. This page walks through the model behind that number on a much smaller example, so you can see each step before you work with 8,000 accounts. You can make most of the project's common mistakes here first, where they cost nothing, and see what each one does to the result.
A company that holds money belonging to its customers, such as a prepaid card balance, a deposit, or an uncashed refund, does not get to keep it just because the customer went quiet. Every state has an unclaimed property law that says when a balance is presumed abandoned: when the owner has shown no interest in it for a set number of years, called the dormancy period. At that point the company reports the balance to the state and sends the money there, and the state holds it until the owner claims it. Sending it is called escheatment. Before reporting, the company usually has to try to reach the owner, which is the due diligence letter.
The reportable balance for a cycle is built in four steps:
| Step | The question | Where it goes wrong |
|---|---|---|
| 1. Rebuild the balance | How much of this customer's money does the company hold? | Counting money that is not the customer's, such as promotional credit |
| 2. Find the last owner contact | When did the owner last show interest? | Counting things the company did, or things that never happened |
| 3. Test dormancy | Has the period run out by the cutoff date? | Using the wrong jurisdiction's period |
| 4. Route it and decide the letter | Which state gets it, and can we write to the owner first? | Sending it to the wrong state, or losing rows in a join |
Juniper Transit is incorporated in Dunmore County. The cutoff for this cycle is June 30, 2026.
| County | Dormancy period for fare-card cash | Does an app login count as owner contact? |
|---|---|---|
| Aspen | 3 years | Yes |
| Birch | 5 years | No |
| Cedar | Exempt: fare cards are never reported | (not applicable) |
| Dunmore | 5 years | Yes |
The company's records are a ledger: one row per movement, with a sign. The balance is the sum of the rows, but only the right rows, and cash and promotional credit have to be kept apart because only the cash is the rider's. Each box below includes a row in the sum. Juniper's card system says this card holds $49.50 in cash and $7.25 in promotional credit, which is the control total your rebuild should tie to.
| In the sum | Date | What happened | Entered by | Kind | Amount |
|---|
Dormancy runs from the last time the owner showed interest. This is the same card, now as a list of everything that touched it. Every event starts ticked, which is the most common first mistake. Untick the ones that are not owner contact, pick the county the rider lives in, and watch the last-contact date and the dormancy test move.
| Counts as contact? | Date | Event | Initiated by |
|---|
Steps 3 and 4 together, on nine cards at once, the way the project works across a whole population. The last-contact dates are already worked out. Each row resolves the county as typed, looks up the period, tests the anniversary against the cutoff, and routes the balance. Move the cutoff to see balances cross into dormancy, and turn on the two mistakes to see what each one does to the report.
| Card | County as typed | Address | Last contact | Cash | Reports to | Anniversary | Dormant? | Reportable | Letter? |
|---|
The project is the same four steps at scale, with the rules from the counsel memo instead of the practice rules above. Read the memo for three things this page does not have: which systems an entry can come through and which of those count as the owner, a second kind of property that runs its own clock, and a footnote. The memo's dormancy periods are not typed out like the table above. They are in Schedule A, a scanned image, and reading it into a table is part of the work. The project guide gives the exact definitions the numbers are graded against.