We are a nation of the lost, hiding in plain sight.

There are tens of billions of dollars sitting in the unclaimed property funds that states run, just waiting to be taken back by rightful owners who have lost track of various stock dividends, tax refunds, bank accounts and the like.

Orphaned 401(k) balances are a big enough problem that the Department of Labor commissioned a report from experts in the retirement industry. They had trouble agreeing on who should even be classified as missing or lost in the first place. Employers are increasingly writing rules for their workplace retirement accounts that make it easier to push former employees’ accounts out of the plans altogether. That way, they can wipe their hands of the responsibility for finding them.

On one hand, it sure doesn’t seem that hard to track many of these individuals down. The Internal Revenue Service and the Social Security Administration used to help with the hunt, but both have bowed out in recent years, citing ever easier ways to locate the missing. This summer, my colleague Sam Roberts reported on some of the boldface names, like Madonna and Jerry Seinfeld, in the New York unclaimed property database. The states that run them try to put a positive spin on it all; you can search Florida’s at FLTreasureHunt.org.

But the unmistakable impression I got after several days wallowing in the rules and infrastructure around lost payments is that many entities are not even bothering with a mere Google search for owners of the lost accounts. So why don’t they look harder? And what are we all supposed to do to avoid getting lost in the first place?