Almost one in 10 people (33 million) in the United States have unclaimed property languishing somewhere — bank accounts, unpaid life insurance benefits, utility deposits, unused rebate cards. When the owner can’t be located, the money or property is submitted to the state.

In New Jersey, the task of then trying to get the property back to the rightful owners falls to the Unclaimed Property Administration in the Department of the Treasury. That bounteous agency annually publishes a list of the assets reported to the state in the previous fiscal year. For the 2022 fiscal year — which ended in June — the UPA returned a record $163 million in assets to their rightful owners. The list for the 2022 fiscal year, which ran in newspapers around the state last week, had more than 224,000 names and businesses, up from 153,000 in the 2021 fiscal year when the UPA returned $139 million in assets to rightful owners.

But get this: The UPA is safeguarding assets worth a combined $5.9 billion that are waiting to be claimed. This year’s list of newly added properties is available by county on the Unclaimed Property Administration’s website. The Department of the Treasury points out in a news release that while “certain third-party companies will charge a fee to connect individuals with their assets, there is never a charge for searching UPA’s database or for claiming property on the State’s secure website. Once approved, the asset is returned to its rightful owner with interest.”