All 50 states have escheat laws awarding to state governments ownership of unclaimed property in business hands, which can range from bank, insurance, and stock holdings whose proper owners cannot be found to retail gift cards never cashed in. The revenue looms peculiarly large for the state of Delaware, because it is the state of incorporation for so many businesses. In recent years friction has been growing between the state and its corporate citizens as the state government has taken an increasingly aggressive stance in auditing corporations for unreported escheatable property. [WSJ] So far, perhaps, so routine (except for the parties to the dispute), but some accounts omit one of the most salient angles, summed up by one critic [Douglas Lindholm, IBD via Volokh] as follows:

Last year alone, Delaware seized $319.5 million from liquidated property while returning only $18.9 million of unclaimed property to its rightful owners.

Delaware does this through an unfair, onerous and expensive audit system that “looks back” to 1981, and contrives unclaimed property if the company doesn’t have records for all those years. This process often costs companies millions of dollars, mires them in years of audits, and forces them to deal with third-party auditors who are motivated by contingent fees to invent unclaimed property where none exists.

Kelmar, which conducts most of the audits for the Delaware Department of Finance and works on a contingent fee, was paid more than $30 million in the second half of 2012 alone.

Again and again — whether in forfeiture laws entitling law enforcers to a share of the booty seized, or percentage awards for informants under whistleblower laws, or traffic camera systems in which the operators of the cameras get a share of ticket revenue, contingency fees for participants in law enforcement prove deeply problematic. In my chapter on contingency fees in The Litigation Explosion, I summed things up this way:

Contingency fees tend to be disfavored in professions to whom the interests of others are helplessly entrusted, where misconduct is hard to monitor…. Giving traffic cops contingency fees by hinging their bonuses on whether they make a ticket quota arouses widespread anger because it so obviously tempts the officer running under quota to be unfair to the motorist. The same is true of giving tax collectors contingency fees by hinging their bonuses on how many deductions they disallow or how many assets they seize. (“Tax farming,” the old system where private parties were deputized to collect taxes and keep some of the haul for themselves, was abolished long ago in well-run countries, not because it was the least bit inefficient — it was a favorite way for Roman emperors to extract revenue from conquered provinces — but because it encouraged brutality and trampling of due process in tax collection.)

Delaware seems to have gotten its image in trouble through a variant on tax farming. Let’s hope a lesson is being learned.

Filed under: contingent fee, Delaware, taxes