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The case for investor alarm is stark: states are rewriting unclaimed-property rules to take custody of securities from people who are demonstrably reachable and still collecting dividends.
The risk is that the same laws sold as consumer protection are generating measurable revenue for state budgets, and the two motives are impossible to separate.
How dormancy rules changed Computershare, one of the country's largest stock transfer agents, notes that most states once waited seven years before classifying a securities account as abandoned.
Today more than half use three years. The more consequential shift is in the trigger itself.
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