For years, Jamie Burden thought he was paying his victims back.
After he wrecked a stolen motorcycle, a Colorado court ordered him to pay more than $8,000 in restitution. Burden said the state garnished half his paycheck for years. Eventually, he paid it off.
Then he learned something incredible. His victims hadn't received a single cent. The money had ended up in Colorado’s unclaimed restitution system.
The criminal paid. The government collected. The victims got nothing.
I investigate unclaimed money for a living, and Burden’s story exposed a disturbing problem: Restitution that criminals actually pay often never reaches the people they were ordered to compensate.
Offenders paid. Victims didn't see the money
California provides a particularly vivid example. A recent state audit found that
over a decade, people under corrections supervision were ordered to pay approximately $1.9 billion in victim restitution. California collected only about $53 million, but even when officials collected the money, they often couldn't deliver it.
The auditor found that officials couldn't direct 60% of collected restitution-order payments because they lacked adequate victim information. In 9,834 cases, offenders had fully paid. Yet officials estimated they had usable contact information for only about 4,300 victims.
At least 11,000 victims were entitled to restitution they didn't get. Apparently, collecting the victims' money was easier than keeping the victims' addresses.
And California is hardly alone.
New York's comptroller examined 13 county probation departments in 2021. Every one had undisbursed restitution. About $1.6 million was sitting on deposit. In Suffolk County, some money had been sitting there for 27 years.
Virginia courts transferred approximately $1.57 million in unclaimed restitution to the Virginia Victims Fund in fiscal 2025 because victims couldn't be located.
Pennsylvania reported more than $1.2 million in unclaimed restitution over three recent fiscal years.
States are great at collecting money. Then what?
How does this happen?
Some explanations are mundane. Victims move. Some die. Databases don't communicate. Restitution sometimes arrives years after the crimes.
But there's a larger problem. Government has powerful tools to collect money. Finding the rightful recipients apparently isn't always treated with the same urgency.
States garnish wages, seize money from inmate accounts, intercept payments and search for assets.
Texas goes further. Its prison system provides inmate information to the comptroller to search for forgotten assets belonging to incarcerated people who owe restitution. If officials find qualifying money, the state can claim it on behalf of the victims.
That's good. That's exactly what government should do. But if government can search databases to find a criminal's forgotten money, why can't it use the same determination to find the victim?
There's an uncomfortable financial conflict here. Governments can benefit when money remains unclaimed.
Two U.S. Supreme Court justices recognized this problem. In 2016, Justice Samuel Alito, joined by Justice Clarence Thomas, observed that states had increasingly sophisticated tools to locate property owners while also benefiting financially when property remained unclaimed.
They were discussing unclaimed property, not crime victims. But the tension is similar.
California's nonpartisan Legislative Analyst's Office identified the same conflict: Unreturned money becomes available to the general fund, creating an incentive to reunite less money with its rightful owners. That's troubling when we're talking about forgotten bank accounts. It's considerably worse when the rightful recipients are crime victims.
Florida offers perhaps the most outrageous example. Under state law, certain victim restitution remaining unclaimed one year after an offender's supervision ends can eventually be transferred into Florida's general revenue fund.
Follow the money. A person is victimized. A judge orders restitution. The criminal pays. The government collects. The victim receives nothing. Eventually, the money can help fund government. That's backwards. Restitution isn't intended to finance government operations. It's collected for the victims.
States shouldn't lose sight of actually getting money to victims
States love announcing how much restitution they collect, but that's not the most important statistic. The number that matters is how much actually reaches victims.
California has considered legislation to improve the transmission of victim contact information to corrections officials. That's a start. However, the larger solution is straightforward. Use the same determination to find victims that government already uses to find money.
Jamie Burden says he spent years watching half his paycheck disappear because Colorado was determined to collect what he owed. The problem was what happened afterward.
Once the criminal has paid, getting the money to the victim should be the easiest part. Too often, it isn't.
Mark Lewyn is a former staff writer for USA TODAY’s Money section and founder of UnclaimedMoneyGuy.com, which tracks unclaimed money programs across the United States. He can be reached at mark.lewyn@gmail.com.
This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Criminals pay restitution. Why doesn't it reach victims? | Opinion
