The Central Bank of Kuwait is asking bank officials a question and the intent is to clarify what the CBK calls dormant accounts which have remained untouched for more than years.
The question is why the banks are holding on to his money instead of returning this money to their owners or their heirs. This came against the background of the discovery that 4 banks kept people’s money (bank balances) that no one has claimed for many years, some of which reached more than 10 years and others for decades, reports a local Arabic daily.
The daily added, there are several accounts with banks or financial and investment institutions that are described as dormant because their owners have not contacted these financial institutions for a long time, and a banker says this phenomenon is not new, but it seems now the CBK officials are seeking to address this file radically.
However, the according to the banks they are unable to reach the owners of these accounts and all their attempts have failed, including coordination with the Public Authority for Civil Information to update the data of these customers. No bank has ever succeeded in reaching the accounts holders which led to these accounts remaining unclaimed for decades.
On the other hand, it was known that the Central Bank unofficially stated the need to exert more banking effort in this regard, which prompted the banks to search for other possible solutions in preparation for anticipating the opinion of the Central Bank regarding the possibility of their application.
They are not the only banks that face a problem in dealing with dormant accounts, as there are local investment funds that suffer from this accounting problem.
In practice, there is more than one consideration that contributed to the increase in the number of dormant accounts in Kuwaiti banks, the first of which is public subscriptions in joint stock companies, of which the state offered a share to citizens, as a large segment of them opened bank accounts for these properties, before their contact with the bank was cut off, and there are forgotten accounts that were opened since the end of the 1980s.
There are also accounts opened in some banks since the mid-nineties, but they are “forgotten”, as their owners have not carried out any withdrawals or deposits since then, due to the small amount of money deposited in them, in addition to the fact that the owners of some accounts abandoned them many years ago after they moved to another bank.
The sources indicated that the balances of some of these accounts do not exceed 15 dinars, while other amounts reach hundreds of thousands.
In addition, the high rate of departures of expatriates recently, due to the end of their work period or their deportation, has increased the percentage of dormant accounts, but the amounts in them are often very low, and some of them contain only few dinars that can be counted on the fingertips.
The sources indicated that the Central Bank is keen to return the inactive amounts to their beneficiaries for more than one reason. On the one hand, these amounts represent a stagnant debt on the bank and cannot be disposed of for any banking purpose, and on the other hand, there are regulatory concerns about the possibility of illegal withdrawal from inactive accounts. For years, it has been at risk of being exploited by weak-minded employees, preying on such accounts, as it was already discovered earlier, given that the risks of exploiting these accounts as a window for money laundering operations cannot be overlooked.
In terms of banking, old banks are more exposed to neglected accounts than the newly established, specifically the last 10 years, during which time the banks created a more comprehensive database, allowing banks to easily reach neglected account holders, while modern means enable banks to freeze accounts temporarily upon death of owners, until the appearance of the beneficiaries to claim the money.
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