Gift Cards and Unclaimed Property Law

The District’s Revised Uniform Unclaimed Property Act of 2021 requires businesses to remit the value of gift cards and certificates to the Office of Unclaimed Property after five years of inactivity. The intent is consumer protection — but in practice, the law creates a significant compliance burden that produces almost no benefit for the consumers it’s meant to protect. 

The administrative cost falls hardest on small and local operators. Restaurants must dig through years of records to identify balances that have gone dormant, then document and report them. Businesses with limited administrative staff either absorb that time themselves or pay outside accountants and attorneys to do so — a cost many mom-and-pop shops cannot easily bear. 

The numbers show why this program doesn’t work as designed. Over the past six years, the District has collected more than $7.1 million in dormant gift card balances and returned only $373,000 to consumers — roughly 5%. That recovery rate has stayed in the single digits every year since 2020, largely because restaurants don’t collect a purchaser’s name or contact information at the time of sale. 

Nineteen states, including neighboring Maryland, already exempt gift cards and certificates from unclaimed property law. RAMW also supports exempting gift cards and gift certificates from unclaimed property law, aligning the District with the growing number of jurisdictions that recognize this isn’t meaningful consumer protection — it’s an operational tax on small businesses with negligible upside for the people it’s supposed to help.