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Again and again, readers asked the same basic question: If the government can find you when you owe taxes, tolls, tickets, fines, or fees, why does it suddenly become your job to find the government when it is holding money that belongs to you?

That is the scandal hiding inside America’s unclaimed property system.

Unclaimed property is not a gimmick. It is real money: forgotten bank accounts, uncashed checks, insurance proceeds, payroll checks, stock, refunds, and money owed to deceased relatives.

After a company loses contact with the owner, it eventually turns the property over to the state. The state is supposed to safeguard it until the rightful owner claims it. That sounds fair. It sounds like consumer protection.

Then real life happens.

A father dies without telling his children about an old account. A grandmother owned stock certificates nobody in the family knew existed. A woman changed her name when she married. A family moved six times. A bank merged. A company disappeared. An old address cannot be proven. A probate court wants one document. The state wants another.

And the money just sits there.

One reader told me about money his grandmother left behind in New York. He lives in Texas. The surviving descendants are himself and a cousin who is almost impossible to locate. The property, he said, is mostly tied to stock certificates. New York told him he needed paperwork from a probate judge in Harris County, Texas. He tried. He kept getting rejection letters.

His conclusion was blunt: “Seems the system is designed to keep the funds unclaimed.”

That sentence could be the unofficial slogan of the entire system.

Not because every state employee is acting in bad faith. Many are not. Some unclaimed property offices work hard to return money. Some states have improved their websites, outreach, and automatic matching programs. Some deserve credit.

But from the citizen’s side, the process can feel less like consumer protection and more like government-sponsored keep-away.

More than $100 billion is believed to be sitting in state unclaimed property programs across the country. States return billions every year, and that is good. But if the remaining pile is still enormous, the return system is not working well enough.

I understand why so many readers were skeptical.

When the state has the money, the owner is trying to claim it, and the process still feels similar to an obstacle course, suspicion is not irrational. It is predictable.

The uncomfortable truth is that unclaimed money can be useful to the government while it remains unclaimed. States can hold it, invest it, use it, count on it, or benefit from the float in different ways depending on state law. The owner still has the right to claim it, but the state often benefits while the owner does not.

That creates an incentive problem that deserves far more scrutiny.

Imagine if a bank made it easy to take your money, hard to return it, and then told you it had created a searchable website, so the problem was yours now. People would be furious. Regulators would ask questions. Politicians would hold hearings.

But when states do something similar with unclaimed property, the system is often treated as a harmless public service program.

It is not harmless if your grandmother’s stock is trapped in paperwork. It is not harmless if your father’s money is sitting in a state database years after his death. And it is not harmless if the state can find you when you owe money, but somehow cannot find you when it owes money back.

The government knows how to locate people. It knows how to send tax bills. It knows how to pursue unpaid tolls. It knows how to intercept refunds. It knows how to make people respond.

But when the government is holding citizens’ money, suddenly the burden shifts.

You search. You guess. You print. You notarize. You prove. You wait. You appeal. You try again.

That is not a return system. That is an endurance test.

And it falls hardest on elderly owners, heirs, widows, adult children handling estates, people without perfect records, people dealing with out-of-state probate, and families who do not know what a deceased relative may have owned.

That is why unclaimed money is not just a personal finance topic. It is a government accountability issue.

States should be judged by how much money they return, not how much they hold. They should disclose how much property they have, how much they return each year, and how much the state earns or uses while the money sits there.

They should simplify heir claims, publish clearer amount information, use modern identity matching tools, and automatically return low-risk claims when they can match an owner through tax, address, or other government records.

Above all, states should stop pretending that a search box is enough. A search box is not outreach. A database is not accountability. A claim form is not customer service.

Finding the money may be the easy part. The harder part may be proving that money belongs to you or your family.

That should not be acceptable.

My first column was about finding nearly $30,000 for my cousin. The response taught me that the bigger story is not the money people find. It is the money people cannot get back.

The government should not act like a debt collector when you owe it money and a lost and found clerk when it owes money to you.

If states are going to take custody of private property, they should be required to fight just as hard to return it.

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Anything less is not consumer protection.

It is legalized keep-away.

Mark Lewyn is the founder of the website UnclaimedMoneyGuy.com and a former staff writer for BusinessWeek and USA Today’s Money section. He can be reached at mark@unclaimedmoneyguy.com.