Why Is It Taking So Long — and What Happens to Unclaimed Money?

Two complaints dominate conversations about the Public Trustee: it takes years, and money seems to vanish. The Public Curator Act (Chapter 81) explains both — and gives you a route back to money you thought was gone.

Why administration takes time

The Act builds in waiting periods before anything can be distributed. They are protections, not obstruction.

• Three months. An order to administer under section 10 commonly depends on probate or administration not being applied for within three months of the death.
• 21 days. Notice of the order must be gazetted and advertised within 21 days (section 13).
• Creditors must be called in. Under section 20, the Public Trustee advertises in the National Gazette and in newspapers calling on creditors to come in and prove their debts by a fixed time. Distribution waits on that.
• Six months for a rejected claim. Where a claim is refused or not received, section 21 gives the claimant six months from the notice to sue before assets can be distributed free of it.
• Twelve months before investment. Section 17 requires money still standing to an estate’s credit after 12 months to be invested.

Add tracing beneficiaries across provinces, land titles, superannuation and disputed customary entitlements, and several years is ordinary rather than exceptional.

The six-year rule

This is the provision families need to know about, and almost nobody does.

Section 18 requires the Public Trustee, in January of each year, to pay into the Consolidated Revenue Fund all sums of money that were invested under section 17 on the first day of that month and had been lying to the credit of an estate under its control for the previous six years.

The Public Trustee may retain money it thinks likely to be needed to answer payments under a court order in force on 1 January (section 18(2)). Everything else goes.

So an unclaimed share does not sit in the Office indefinitely waiting for someone to appear. After six years it leaves the estate account and enters government revenue.

Getting money back out of the Fund

It is not lost. Section 19 provides the route, and it runs through the court, not the counter.

The National Court or a Judge may, on the application of a person claiming to be entitled to money paid into the Consolidated Revenue Fund under section 18, and on being satisfied by affidavit or other sufficient evidence that the person is so entitled, order payment of the money or part of it.

Two conditions are attached, and both cost you:

• the money is paid without interest from the time it went into the Fund; and
• any costs and expenses incurred by the Public Trustee or otherwise in respect of the application are deducted.

On being served with the order, the Secretary for Finance must within a reasonable time pay the amount to the person named, and that person’s receipt is a sufficient voucher. Notice of the application must be served on the Public Trustee seven clear days before it is heard.

The three-year rule for a surviving spouse

Section 24 contains a separate and more generous timetable. Where:

• no person has, within three years of the death of a deceased intestate, established a claim to the net balance or part of it; and
• the Public Trustee does not know of any next of kin or other person beneficially entitled, and cannot by reasonable efforts ascertain that any such person exists; and
• the deceased left a widow or widower who is still living,

the Public Trustee may pay or transfer to that widow or widower the net balance or part of it. Section 24(4) preserves the right of a person actually entitled to recover it from the recipient afterwards.

Separately, under section 24(1), where the net value of an intestate estate does not exceed K400, the Public Trustee may simply pay the whole net balance to the surviving spouse.

When there is genuinely nobody

Where real estate vested in the Public Trustee belongs to the State as bona vacantia, section 23 requires the net proceeds of sale to be paid into the Consolidated Revenue Fund, and the transfer to a purchaser passes the deceased’s title in the ordinary way.

What to do if you think money is owing

1. Establish your interest — relationship to the deceased, and any documents showing entitlement.
2. Write to the Public Trustee under section 29(2) asking whether an estate file exists, what was received, what was paid out and what remains.
3. Ask specifically whether any balance has been paid into the Consolidated Revenue Fund under section 18, and on what date.
4. If it has, take advice about a section 19 application — remembering the seven clear days’ notice to the Public Trustee.
5. Gather evidence for the affidavit. The Court must be satisfied you are entitled; assertion will not do.