# Have you a dormant account?



## Tintagel (23 Sep 2003)

Does anyone know of anyone who has received a letter from a bank or building society trying to trace the owner of a dormant account. I have a very small dormant account in one of the banks and I can honestly say that no one has tried to contact me.  Are the banks even bothering to trace anyone?


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## davido (23 Sep 2003)

Do you ever get statements of charges accruing on the account?  Maybe they closed the account and you weren't informed.


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## ClubMan (23 Sep 2003)

I know people who received letters in relation to potentially dormant accounts telling them what to do to reactivate them etc. Have you ever changed address and not informed the institution in question?

For what it's worth _OASIS_ has some information about  and .

Hope this helps.


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## Lavinia (24 Sep 2003)

I suspected a few years back that my late grandmother had opened an account in my name in the early eighties and a Dublin branch of my bank (AIB) told me that an account had once been initiated for me around the time in question, but nothing lodged in it. I contacted my own branch about the matter a few times;  they conducted their enquiries (or so they said) and turned up nothing. Then a year later I got a letter from this same branch saying I had a dormant account with cash in it and to do something about it - the same account about which I had been enquiring. One letter in my name was misspelled on this account, which had sent the bank officials astray, it seemed

Moral of the story: ask your own branch about the suspected account. Ask another branch. Then ask another branch. Then ask another branch. Check for misspellings of your name and various addresses and misspellings of them, too. Good luck.


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## ClubMan (24 Sep 2003)

To be fair (and I'm not saying that you're doing this) but the institution can hardly be blamed for failing to match mis-spelt names unless you mean that they themselves got it wrong in the first place?


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## Grizzly (24 Sep 2003)

*I've only worked here a month.*

Having worked in a bank for many years we used to have two "house" accounts. One called "petty balances" and the other "dormant" accounts. When an account became dormant it was transferred out of the branch record and into a master account called "dormant accounts". So if you came in to a branch and asked an official to look up an account, they would naturally look up the alphabetical index or if you had an account number they would key in the number. The problem was that an account could have been moved from its location and in to the master file of dormant accounts. It might never occur to the counter official to check the file of dormant accounts which might well be under the control of a senior official. Usually an audit requirement.
So don't take "no" for an answer. It could easily be there somewhere.  I am also aware that surnames beginning with the letter O such as Osborne or O'Malley or Mc or Mac were constantly misfiled. The early manual accounts and even the early computerised accounts were not very sophisticated. 
So maybe granny did have loads of money and it didn't go on the sherry.


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## money (18 Nov 2003)

*dormant account*

I had a small account with a bank and never received a letter to say that if I did not activate it it would be classed as dormant.  After my enquiring about it I had to fill in a form in order to re-activate the account about 6 weeks ago and I am still waiting to hear back from the bank.


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