Seth Magaziner is serving his second four-year term as Rhode Island’s general treasurer after being reelected in November 2018.
Magaziner graduated from Brown University, where he served as president of the Brown University Democrats and the Brown Steering Committee on Slavery and Justice. He went on to Yale University, where he earned a master’s degree in business administration.
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In 2009, he worked as an associate at Point Judith Capital, a Rhode Island-based venture capital firm co-founded by Gina M. Raimondo, who was Magaziner’s predecessor as general treasurer before she successfully ran for governor in 2014 and 2018.
Magaziner also worked at Trillium Asset Management, a Boston-based socially responsible investment firm, where he was a vice president and lead analyst for energy, banking and diversified financial-sector investment.
Magaziner discusses the “Your Money” program, which he started in his first term as general treasurer, overhauling the state’s unclaimed property program to make it easier to reunite Rhode Islanders with their missing money.
PBN: When did the “Your Money” program begin?
MAGAZINER: Hundreds of thousands of Rhode Islanders, including many businesses and nonprofits, have missing money sitting in the State Treasury. This missing money is also known as “unclaimed property,” and in most cases these people and organizations don’t even know that they are missing this money. In fact, Providence Business News currently has two unclaimed properties.
Our office’s unclaimed property team travels across the state to help Rhode Islanders find and claim their missing money, and we have an online portal www.findRImoney.com, where Rhode Islanders can search for and claim their unclaimed property, for free.
We launched the Your Money initiative, which automatically reunites many Rhode Islanders with their missing money, in November 2017. We did this because we realized that by comparing our unclaimed property list to other public records databases, we can proactively find people with missing money and reunite them with those funds.
PBN: How many Rhode Islanders have been mailed checks under Your Money?
MAGAZINER: Since we launched the Your Money initiative, we have automatically returned over $25 million to more than 56,500 people, including roughly 4,000 in the last month. In most cases, people didn’t know they had missing money until the checks showed up in their mailboxes.
Even though we are now automatically reuniting many people with their missing money through the Your Money program, people should visit [the program’s website] to search for and claim their missing money, because we only proactively send out checks when we are sure they are going to the right place.
PBN: What are the sources of this missing money?
MAGAZINER: Unclaimed property can include money left in old bank accounts and safe deposit boxes, uncashed paychecks, unused balances on gift certificates, unreturned utility deposits, uncollected insurance payments, and forgotten stocks and dividends.
PBN: How does your office go about finding these unclaimed assets?
MAGAZINER: Businesses are required to turn over property belonging to their customers or vendors to our office for safe holding after three years. We will then hold the money until it is claimed.
PBN: What if you find unclaimed money or assets belonging to people outside the state?
MAGAZINER: No matter where you live, if Rhode Island is holding your missing money, we want to get it back to you.
Scott Blake is a PBN staff writer. Email him at Blake@PBN.com.
