A Job Title Alone Won’t Let You Claim Business Property

• A job title or business card is not evidence of legal authority to claim property on a company's behalf.
• Claims of $1,000 or more in cash must be notarized, and all securities and safe deposit box claims must be notarized regardless of value.
• A written recovery agreement must disclose the nature and value of the property, that the Controller holds it, and the address where the business could claim it directly.
• The 10 per cent fee cap applies to property reported under §1530, which covers most business-held funds such as checking accounts and cashier's checks.
• No fee may be collected before the Controller approves the claim and pays the business.

Why doesn't a job title prove authority to claim for a business?

Say you run the books for a small company, or you are the one who happens to notice the business name sitting on a list of unclaimed property. Your instinct is to file the claim yourself, because you are the person who deals with the bank accounts. That instinct is understandable, but a title does not carry legal weight with the State Controller. Unclaimed business property is often ordinary operating money: checking accounts, cashier’s checks, old vendor refunds. Statewide, checking accounts alone account for 399,537 records worth $1,078,405,026, and cashier’s checks account for 682,998 records worth $785,935,117. Money at that scale is not released on the strength of a job description.

The Controller’s office is verifying that the person signing the claim actually has the standing to bind the entity, not that the person is helpful or well-meaning. A business card says what you do day to day. It says nothing about whether you can legally act for the company in a matter involving its assets.

What does the Controller accept instead of a job title?

What matters is documentation that ties a named individual to the entity’s actual legal authority: the kind of paperwork a court, a bank, or a title company would also ask for before releasing funds in the company’s name. This is a documents question as much as a claims question, and it differs depending on whether the business is active, dissolved, merged, or sold. We walk through the specific categories on how-to-claim/business and how-to-claim/documents, because the right paperwork depends on the entity’s current status, not on a general rule we can state once here.

What we can say plainly is the general shape of the problem: anyone claiming on behalf of an entity needs to show the Controller a chain from the entity itself to the person signing, not simply assert that the chain exists.

Does notarization change anything for a business claim?

Yes, and it applies regardless of who is filing. Claims of $1,000 or more in cash must be notarized, and all securities claims and all safe deposit box claims must be notarized no matter the value (State Controller claim requirements). A California notary may charge at most $15 per signature for an acknowledgment or proof of a deed, and $15 for a jurat (Government Code §8211(a)-(b)). For a business claim this means the person signing is not only asserting authority on paper, they are doing so in front of a notary, which is one more reason a job title by itself will not get a claim through: a notary is acknowledging a signature, not confirming corporate authority.

What if the business has closed, merged, or changed its name?

This is where claims for businesses get genuinely complicated, and where a title is least likely to be enough. A dissolved corporation, a merged subsidiary, or a company that has simply changed its name over the years may have property sitting under an old legal name in the Controller’s files. Working out who now holds the legal authority to claim on behalf of a defunct or restructured entity is a question of corporate and sometimes probate law, and it is not something we are able to answer for you in general terms. That determination is a matter for an attorney.

What we can do is the research side: searching across name variants and former entities so that property reported under an old corporate name is not simply missed. Our index covers 14,639,722 property records statewide, and tracing a business through its past names is often the harder half of the problem, well before the question of who may sign ever comes up.

What must a recovery agreement for a business claim disclose?

If a business engages a recovery firm, the agreement is not a formality. By law it must be in writing, and it must disclose the nature and value of the property, that the Controller currently holds it, and the address where the business could claim it directly (CCP §1582(a)(2)(A)-(B)). It must be signed only after that disclosure is given. A fee to locate or recover property reported under §1530 may not exceed 10 per cent of what is recovered (CCP §1582(a)(2)(C)); that cap applies to the kind of holder-reported business funds covered in this article, as distinct from county-probated estates, which the Controller states carry no fee restriction for investigators. No fee may be collected before the Controller approves the claim and pays the business, and an owner, including a business owner, may challenge a fee as excessive at any time (CCP §1582(a)(1)(B), (a)(3)). See resources/finder-fee-law for the full detail.

What should a business do first?

Start by checking whether the company, or any former name it has operated under, appears in the record. Our free search covers the full statewide file, which is the simplest way to find out whether there is anything to pursue before anyone worries about who is authorized to sign. If a claim does turn up and the authority question is not straightforward, our services/business-audit work is built around exactly this kind of tracing across old entity names, mergers, and reporting history. For a claim that is ready to go, our services/full-service-recovery handles the documentation and filing on a fee that is owed only once the State has paid. We are a private firm, not the State Controller’s office, and we are not affiliated with it; our role is to do the research and paperwork a business owner or officer would otherwise have to do themselves.

Questions People Ask

Figures on this page are from our copy of the State Controller’s published file as it stood on 19 October 2026. The State republishes the file weekly, so current totals will differ. Search is always against the latest copy.