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Home >> Special Situations >> Deceased Individuals
Bank Refuses to Honor Old CD
I am the executrix of my mother's estate. I found a twenty year old bank certificate of deposit in her safe deposit box that appeared to never have been redeemed, because she was required to return it to the bank for redemption. When I presented it to the bank, they said that they could find no record of the CD, because they only keep records back seven years. Do I have any recourse in this matter or do banks just routinely refuse to honor old CDs?
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 Appearances can be deceiving, and the bank may have paid the CD. It's possible that your mother misplaced the certificate of deposit and filed an affidavit to that effect with the bank, and the bank then may have paid out the account.
It's also possible that your mother left the account with the bank and the bank was unable to contact her to verify that it had not been abandoned. State laws, which vary from state to state, require that banks with accounts that have not had activity or for which there has been no customer contact for a number of years (generally three or more) must consider the accounts abandoned and transfer their balances to the state. Banks would surrender such accounts to the state in which the bank was located or the state in which the depositor resided.
If the funds were surrendered as abandoned property, a good place to start looking is missingmoney.com a free website maintained by several states' custodians of abandoned property. As for the seven year record retention statement, that's fairly standard in the industry, and reflects a combination of federal and state laws relating to the maintenance of bank records.
Published on BankingQuestions.com 1/21/10
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