Find your lost Unclaimed Superannuation
A surprisingly high number of working Australians lose contact with their Superannuation fund at some point in their career. According to some estimates it can be as high as one in three Australians. It is quite likely that you could be one of them. Perhaps you changed jobs, moved to a new address, or changed your name without remembering to notify your fund.
If so, there are easy ways for you to find lost Super. This article will outline free services that exist to find and retrieve unclaimed funds belonging to you. You could search for lost funds in bank accounts, insurance accounts, and even find lost Super.
Here are the primary types of unclaimed fund searches that we will discuss:
- Unclaimed Superannuation Accounts
- Bank Accounts, Life Insurance and Shares
- Other unclaimed money including shareholders’ dividends, uncollected goods and un-presented cheques and wages
None of the search services mentioned in this article requires any fees. They can be used to find lost Super and other unclaimed funds in your name, and are completely free to use.
Avoid fund recovery fees
If you happen to have some unclaimed funds belonging to you in some account, you might receive a call or an offer from some company claiming to recover it for you. Often they will make it sound very official by asking for a signed authorisation form nominating them as your agent, and other documents such as an Office of State Revenue (OSR) claim form. They may charge as much as 14% of the unclaimed amount as a fee for this recovery service.
The fact is that you can claim this money directly from the OSR website online in most of the cases, and for free too. Given that recovering these funds is so simple there is really no need for you to pay any third party, be it a fund recovery company or another Super fund, to retrieve it for you. Follow this simple step-by-step guide and you can easily avoid exorbitant fund recovery fees.
Superannuation Accounts
Follow these guidelines to search for and locate lost Superannuation funds in your name:
- You can search for any matches in your name for lost or unclaimed Super funds in the SuperSeeker database, maintained by the Australian Taxation Office. The ATO database is free to run queries on and can be accessed online at the given link.
- AUSfund maintains an unclaimed Super website, where you can also search for free to see if there are any matches against your name and date of birth. AUSfund acts like a holding account (officially it’s an eligible rollover fund) which contains money that other funds cannot track back as belonging to a current member of theirs.
- You can always contact your old fund directly, which is often the quickest way to locate any lost money in your name. If you do not remember the contact details of your previous funds you can get in touch with your former employer, they should have the records as to the Superannuation fund used while you were employed with them.
- If you got in touch with your old fund they would also be able to verify if you are listed in the Lost Members Register. It is easy for these funds to run searches on the ATO database; they are linked via the SuperMatch system. If they do find lost or unclaimed Super in your name they can advise you on the best way to transfer the money to your current Superannuation account.
- After the account holder reaches the retirement age (65) your unclaimed Super funds no longer reside with any holding agency, but are turned over to the State where the original fund is based. It then becomes the responsibility of the State to maintain the fund amount. If this is applicable in your case you need to find the correct State to contact, it will be the one where your lost Super fund has their headquarters.
- To reduce the chances of losing money in Superannuation funds you might look into consolidating all of them into one Super account. This is also prudent financial practice, as it minimises the overhead costs of administrative fees and charges to be paid to multiple Super funds.
A member is officially recorded as ‘lost’ when the account had been inactive for two or more years, and at least two letters in the mail that were addressed to the member’s residence have been returned undelivered. According to the regulations the fund is supposed to report incidences of lost members as soon as they are officially recognised to the ATO. This information gets appended to an ATO database called the Lost Members Register.
The difference between lost and unclaimed Super is in the age of the account holder. Any amount of money lying in Super funds only becomes eligible for payment to retired people or those who are eligible for a pay-out because of some disability. Therefore ‘lost’ Super money can continue to grow from the investments of the fund up until the member reaches retirement age. An ‘unclaimed’ Super is when the member is over retirement age (or dead) and there are no claims made on that account. Unclaimed Super funds become the responsibility of the State and are no longer under the investment of the fund.
Bank Accounts, Life Insurance and Shares
The best way to locate information about any Shares or bank accounts that you may have money lying in is to search the Australian Securities and Investments Commission’s (ASIC) consumer website.
Other Unclaimed Money
We have already discussed how unclaimed Super accounts get transferred to the State or Territory. But these State agencies are in charge of other unclaimed money as well, including:
- shareholders’ dividends
- rental bonds
- trust account funds
- uncollected goods
- un-presented cheques.
Not every type of the above mentioned funds are the responsibility of each State, while some States keep record of additional types of lost/unclaimed money. The following table lists some the important contact details of Federal and State agencies, and also indicates what form of queries, online or otherwise, can be made through them.
| Unclaimed money: federal, state and territory contacts | ||||
| Organisation | Online search | Phone search | Phone number | Email address |
| Australian Securities and Investments Commission www.fido.gov.au |
• | • | 1300 300 630 | infoline@asic.gov.au |
| Australian Taxation Office www.ato.gov.au |
• | • | 13 28 65 | supermail@ato.gov.au |
| State agencies | ||||
| ACT: Public Trustee — Unclaimed Moneys www.publictrustee.act.gov.au |
• | • | 02 6207 9800 | publictrustee@act.gov.au |
| NSW: Office of State Revenue — Unclaimed money www.osr.nsw.gov.au |
• | • | 1300 366 016 | unclaimedmoney@osr.nsw.gov.au |
| NT: Treasury — Unclaimed Moneys www.nt.gov.au/ntt |
• | 1300 305 353 | ntrevenue.ntt@nt.gov.au | |
| Qld: Public Trustee Unclaimed Moneys service www.pt.qld.gov.au |
• | 07 3213 9368 | unclaimedmoney@pt.qld.gov.au | |
| SA: Department of Treasury and Finance — Unclaimed Money www.treasury.sa.gov.au |
• | 08 8226 3106 | unclaimedmonies@saugov.sa.gov.au | |
| Tas: Department of Treasury and Finance www.treasury.tas.gov.au |
03 6233 2948 | unclaimed.money@treasury.tas.gov.au | ||
| Vic: State Revenue Office — Unclaimed Moneys www.sro.vic.gov.au |
• | 13 21 61 | sro@sro.vic.gov.au | |
| WA: Department of Treasury and Finance — Unclaimed Monies www.money.dtf.wa.gov.au |
• | • (limited) | 08 9222 9185 | unclaimed.money@dtf.wa.gov.au |
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