During my time as Kansas State Treasurer, we have innovated several new ways to reach out to Kansas taxpayers and return their unclaimed property, with great success.  We’ve been able to give back record numbers of money for the past two years running, and we are not about to stop now.

This month we are launching an initiative we call “Bucks Back to Business,” which involves partnering with counties all across Kansas to get unclaimed property back in the hands of Kansas businesses.

At the state treasurer’s office, we are on the phone all week long reaching out to businesses in Kansas letting them know we have money that belongs to them that we’d like to return.

As you can imagine, we are finding that with the increasing number of telephone scammers calling people, it is difficult for business owners to believe us when we tell them we have money for them, and we’d like to give it back for free. While it sounds too good to be true, it is our mission to get these dollars back to their rightful owners. So, we decided to try a different approach.

For the next several months we will be traveling across Kansas meeting with local chambers of commerce and city and county officials talking to them about how we can best reach Kansas businesses in their home towns and encourage those business owners to claim their cash. It is our hope that with the help of these trusted neighbors and friends, more business owners will feel safe and confident contacting us. We plan to get to as many counties as we can this year and hope to keep putting more money back in Kansans’ pockets.

In the meantime, anyone wanting to check for themselves or others can always go to our website Kansascash.com and see if we have any unclaimed property waiting to be returned to them.

And please remember, we never charge for web searches, processing claims, or returning money. Anyone who asks for a fee, you can be sure is not the Kansas State Treasurer’s Office.

Jake LaTurner is the Kansas State Treasurer.