Guest Poster contributed;
It appears the state Treasurer’s office has joined the effort to make on-line access even dumber. The lack of ergonomic design in website development shows those of us who have to use their sites, how little they themselves actually use them. Let’s explain, the state of South Dakota, in an effort to collect funds from unsuspecting individuals and businesses decided to make it harder for the owners of lost funds to actually reclaim them. The excellent State Treasurer at the time actually fought all the way to the Supreme Court to protect the average citizens against the greedy hands of bankers and the Governor’s office.
As a result, the state, bankers and other keepers of our assets have collected millions of dollars through hard to use processes. Recently I had to use the SD State Treasurer’s Unclaimed Property website to assist in reclaiming a savings account.
What we found was amazing.
No wonder so little is returned to the rightful owners. The state actually used to actively assist and find the owners – but no more. They now have this cute website where it only allows you to only search by exact spelling. Do you know what is wrong about this? This takes data from many databases where the names are misspelled. In our Scandinavian land of *sen and *son plus the Irish apostrophe names leaves us with no way to accurately find lost assets Why can’t we search by address? Why can’t we search by city? Zip code County?  Phonic spelling?
How about searching by the bank or business name where deposit was made? If there was an ability to search by business where property was found, we citizens and customers could actually discover how bad their databases are. So why isn’t there an ability to search by business?
Treasurer Sattgast must have asked SOS Gant how to design an ALEC based website. This is an insider’s website for insiders. The design of this site is not for the average user to use. Try it for yourself and see how bad it is.
