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Darren Jack, chairman of the Unclaimed Property Professionals Organization, a non-profit group that educates holders of unclaimed property and companies that provide services finding assets, said Ms Finley’s response is encouraging.

“I’d like to see something implemented fairly quickly and also very transparently so it’s easy to use,” said Jack, who is also the managing Director at Impact 360 Degrees Inc., an Ontario based company that helps find missing assets.

The degree of government openness varies across North America. Some state governments in the U.S. go to the extent of attending county fairs armed with names of people who haven’t claimed their property.

Canada lags other developed countries, but Jack hopes Ottawa and the provinces will move to help Canadians gain access to billions of dollars worth of assets. Currently, only Quebec, Alberta and British Columbia have unclaimed property legislation and online searches.

Jack said the five-year figures provided by Public Works Canada suggests that the total amount of money being held by the federal government is likely worth about $2 billion.

“The perception is some governments take that as basically another tax grab when they aren’t really proactively putting systems in place for people to find and recover their money.”

Even if a online database is created, experience in other jurisdictions suggests that less than half the money will ever be claimed, he said. That’s because the unclaimed property often belongs to people who have died, involves small individual amounts or records are incomplete.

The government is encouraging Canadians to register for direct deposits at www.directdeposit.gc.ca so payments are automatically transferred to the recipient’s bank account and it plans to phase out issuing cheques, including all pension payments, by April 2016.

That should help to reduce the number of future uncashed cheques but won’t clear up the backlog, both experts said.