The Great Colorado Payback website, Colorado’s unclaimed money website has been blocking certain names from its searchable database. Certain prominent Colorado names including Denver Broncos’ legend John Elway have accounts with unclaimed money, but if you were to try and search them it would show no results. Based on an investigation, there were nearly 100 names including, former Gov. Bill Ritter and Gov. Bill Owens. The list seems to not be political as both Republicans and Democrats were excluded.
Dave Young, the current Colorado Treasurer has been in office sine 2019. His office confirmed that they have not intentionally blocked any names from the database. They have launched an investigation into when and how this happened and instructed the company they use for the database to unblock over 300 names.
“Certainly if a term is blocked, that’s going to affect someone’s ability to search,” Young said. “There may very well be property being held by the state treasury, but the website is saying you have no property here, and that’s a wrong conclusion. We still have to have a deeper understanding of how these terms were blocked inside of the vendor’s software. We’re trying to figure this out.”
~Dave Young, Colorado State Treasurer via CBS Denver
Former Colorado State Rep from 2006-2012 and House Speaker Frank McNulty thinks this sounds a little shady.
“Somebody did something purposefully to harm their fellow Coloradans. There needs to be an investigation of what happened here, and the people who did this need to have an appropriate explanation for why they blocked our names, or be accountable for what they did, because I suspect what they did wasn’t right.”
Frank McNulty, Former Colorado State Rep
Young says he’s not sure how long the investigation will take, but did try assure Coloradans that the blocks have all been removed and encouraged to search the website.