Texas: Millions of dollars remain uncollected by crime victims

Charlie Geren ordered and paid for a pair of custom-made cowboy boots more than a decade ago.

Weeks and months went by, but the boots never arrived in the mail.

Eventually the Republican state representative found out that the man he and several others, including Texas Comptroller Glenn Hegar, bought them from never completed the orders. Ultimately, the man stood trial and went to jail.

The man was was ordered to pay restitution. And Geren received an occasional check for $20 or $25.

Then the checks stopped coming.

“When the checks stopped, I thought that was it,” Geren said.

But it wasn’t.

Turns out there was $2,194.94 in Travis County’s crime victims restitution fund waiting for him to claim.

He just didn’t know about it until this year.

“I haven’t changed my mailing address since the 1980s,” said Geren, who recently claimed the restitution earmarked for him. “If they wrote me a letter saying I had $2,000, I would have said, ‘Let me have it.’ ”

Now, as millions of dollars awarded to other Texas crime victims pile up in state coffers and in counties statewide, Geren said he’s determined to make it easier for victims to find out about and receive money meant for them.

“There’s a whole lot of people who don’t know about this,” he said.

He already has met with Hegar and his staff, discussing legislation to possibly add crime victim restitution to the state’s Unclaimed Property website, where Texans already search online for funds they may have forgotten about or not known is due to them.

“There’s no question we will be able to do this [legislation] next year,” Geren said. “We’re going to try to streamline the process to make it easier for people to get their money.”

The Legislature goes back to work Jan. 10, 2017.

Crime victim restitution

Quite often judges order criminals to pay for injuries or damage they caused to their victims.

In Tarrant County alone, that type of payment adds up to about $2 million a year, records show.

But some victims never know they are supposed to receive the money.

Counties must send letters to victims to let them know they are due money and then forward the payments to them once they are received.

In Tarrant County, workers send certified letters to victims letting them know that restitution has been ordered.

The address where they send the letter is generally is the same place they send the money, said Cobi Tittle, assistant director of the Community Supervision and Corrections Department in Tarrant County.

But sometimes that letter comes back, or officials notice that the payment checks aren’t being cashed.

In Tarrant County, that’s when workers turn to an extra online service the department pays about $6,000 a year to use that continues to search for ways to contact the victims, Tittle said.

But even with that added step, some victims can’t be found.

When that happens, “that payment goes into an interest-bearing account,” Tittle said. “It stays there while we are in the process of finding our victim.”

Texas law requires counties to keep the money there, if not paid out to the victim, for five years.

After that, if victims still haven’t been located, those funds are sent to the Texas comptroller’s office, minus the 5 percent that stays, by law, in the county.

Once the funds reach the state, they go into a general unclaimed compensation to crime victims fund, comptroller’s office spokesman Chris Bryan said.

Victims can still claim that money once it reaches the state, if they learn that some of the funds are theirs.

About $8.7 million is in the comptroller’s account, state records show.

Millions unclaimed

The amount sent to the comptroller’s office varies from year to year.

In 2012, for example, Tarrant County sent $80,196.31 in unclaimed restitution to the state.

The amount was high that year, Tittle said, because two corporations were owed restitution — one for $44,000 and the other for $17,000 — but they both had gone out of business and the owners couldn’t be located.

In as 2014, Tarrant County sent $12,792.43 in unclaimed restitution to the state because most of the local victims were found, records show.

But the total adds up statewide.

Over the past 10 years, more than $16.2 million in unclaimed crime victim restitution — including more than $571,000 from Tarrant County — has been sent from counties to the comptroller’s office, records show.

When the total in the state’s account significantly tops $8 million, the excess is sent to the Texas attorney general’s office to help other crime victims, Bryan said.

State help

The AG’s office oversees a crime victims’ compensation program that helps reimburse victims “for certain out-of-pocket expenses incurred as a result of violent crime,” according to the office’s website.

Victims may be approved for claims up to $50,000 that could include reimbursement for medical or counseling costs, loss of wages, funerals, crime scene clean-up, loss of wages, even a one-time relocation expenses for some victims attacked in their homes, state records show.

Local and state officials say they can’t release the list of victims due money because of confidentiality laws, but they encourage victims to contact county officials to find out if there is any money due to them.

“We have a group of folks who work very, very hard to find the victims and get [their restitution] to them,” Tittle said. “We do our part to make sure their rights are afforded to them.”

This story was originally published May 27, 2016 at 4:58 PM with the headline "Texas: Millions of dollars remain uncollected by crime victims."