To participate in auction:

The sale will take place at noon, Friday, Dec. 8 at Sierra Auction, 3570 Grand Ave., Phoenix. Live in-person bids will be accepted, and bids can also be placed online at www.sierraauction.com prior to the auction as well as during a live, online simulcast of the auction. The  online auction is from Dec. 6-10 until 5 p.m.

By Cecilia Chan

INDEPENDENT NEWSMEDIA

Going once. Going twice. Sold.

People’s forgotten treasures are on the auction block this week, courtesy of the Arizona Department of Revenue. The annual auction is for property from safe-deposit boxes that has been unclaimed for a period of at least five years.

“The bulk of it is vintage U.S. currency or vintage currency from other countries,” said department spokesman Ed Greenberg said. “There are jewelry and precious metal, lots of it is antique jewelry.”

The department currently holds over 2,000 unclaimed safe deposit boxes. On average, up to 1,000 unclaimed boxes are reported to the department each year, Mr. Greenberg said.

Safe deposit boxes are considered abandoned when there has been inactivity for five years or more, generally due to the box owner moving away and leaving no forwarding address for the financial institution or in most of the cases, the owner has died and there are no forwarding addresses to reach relatives elsewhere in the country, according to Mr. Greenberg.

Mr. Greenberg said the contents from the safe deposit boxes sit in the state’s vault until there is a determination made to hold an auction to free up space for other boxes.

Sierra Auction has valued the items to be sold this week at $200,000, Mr. Greenberg said.

“Bidders range from collectors to people who may be looking for a unique gift that has some value,” he said. “The auction house indicated they expect people from the state of New York, Massachusetts and even California coming out to the auction on Friday.”

Proceeds from items sold at the auction are put into a custodial account for the rightful owners to claim.

“There is no deadline to file a claim,” Mr. Greenberg said. “It could be a year from now or 20 years from now.”

The custodial account, in excess of $1 billion in claimable unclaimed property, includes old bank accounts, tax credits and uncashed pay checks. Safe deposit box auction proceeds make up less than 1 percent of that $1 billion, Mr. Greenberg said.

“We have unclaimed property dating back 30 to 40 years,” he added.

The department’s Unclaimed Property Unit returns millions of dollars of unclaimed property to their rightful owners every year. In fiscal year 2017, more than $57 million was paid out to claimants, the best year on record, according to the department. The state passed an Unclaimed Property Law in 1956.

The amounts returned to claimants so far ranged from under $1 to more than $2 million in one case, according to Mr. Greenberg.

The unit attempts to track down rightful owners each year by sending out tens of thousands of notices to people, posting newspaper advertisements and reaching out to other states, which also have these specialize units, Mr. Greenberg said.

“We take it very seriously,” he said. “At the end of the day it’s someone else’s money. It’s someone else’s property. It’s up to us as a department on behalf of taxpayers to try and attempt to track down the rightful owners.”