Billions of euros are sleeping in bank accounts in Germany that have been inactive for years or simply forgotten. “In most cases, the account owners have died and have no heirs or the bank account number does not appear in any documents of the deceased”, economist Prof. Christian Klein from the University of Kassel tells ARD. He is also surprised by the results of a new study commissioned by the German Ministry of Science and Education, which shows that up to 4.2 billion euros of unclaimed money is at stake. “However, it is possible that these are illegal funds obtained from money laundering, drug trafficking or other types of crime, whose owners may be happy that the money is considered forgotten“, adds expert Klein.
After 30 years, banks close the account
A cash account is officially considered forgotten when the banking institution has not been able to track down its owner for years and establish contact with him. “Permanently inactive bank accounts, however, are subject to a multi-stage system of checks and registration“, says a bank employee.
If the search for the owner remains unsuccessful for 30 years, most banks close the account. But even if someone suddenly calls after 45 years and manages to credibly prove their rights to the account, the bank is obliged to pay them the money.
Banks remain silent
However, banks are reluctant to talk about this money, ARD notes, in connection with the fact that numerous journalistic questions about this problem have remained unanswered. “There is a sense of inconvenience that the bank is holding someone else's money but does not know whose it is. But in fact there is no problem with that“, Torsten Höhe, a representative of the German Association of Private Banks, told ARD. According to him, in Germany, it is very clearly regulated what happens when a banking institution loses contact with its client and what efforts it must make.
Does the state have the right to use the money?
The billions of euros that lie forgotten in bank accounts, of course, also give rise to different appetites - including on the part of the German government. For example, the following is written in the coalition agreement of the current government: “We promote social innovation and for this purpose we use funds from ownerless accounts in a revolving fund“. (A type of monetary fund that replenishes itself through various revenues and can then use this capital again for new projects or to finance other activities - editor's note.) In order for the federal government to create such a fund, however, the banks would have to provide the money to the state.
And they consider this request problematic. "We have a contract with the client and I don't think we can be expected to hand these funds over to anyone else. Besides, of course, there is always a bad taste when the state gets its hands on private property," says legal expert Torsten Höhe.
However, there are examples elsewhere in Europe of how such cooperation between banks and the state can function without problems. Economist Prof. Klein gives the example of Great Britain, where a social fund is financed with such "forgotten" bank funds, and quite successfully.
The problem will get bigger
And the problem of forgotten bank accounts is likely to get even bigger in the future. This is due to the fact that people are increasingly servicing their bank accounts online. And for them, there are no savings books or
other paper documents to remind them of the money, even when the account holder has died.
There are also cases when a forgotten PIN code prevents the computer application with the bank account from being updated. Much of this data is now only on people's smartphones, and it is not always accessible to another person. Current data in Germany shows that of the total of 110 million debit bank accounts available, over 70% of them are now only serviced online.
Author: Christoph Dörr ARD