eGUMIS

Several months back, my mum came across two old BSN bank books, one of which was a joint account with my sister. She asked me to bring her to a BSN branch to close the accounts. Unfortunately, because these were inactive for more than seven years, they were already closed and we were told to go to Komtar to reclaim the money.

Komtar is the name of a building on Penang island and so I asked the bank staff the name of the organisation that held the money but I couldn't understand her. So I gave up and instead did a web search later. That was when I came across eGUMIS, a web portal established by Jabatan Akauntan Negara Malaysia i.e. Malaysia Department of Accountant to enable people to claim unclaimed money online, rather than physically going to their office.

There were a couple of obstacles I encountered: firstly, it wasn't possible to claim money in joint account; secondly, annoyingly it took many tries (over the course of nearly 2 weeks) for the portal to work properly i.e. I couldn't select any of the account (the check boxes remained unchecked despite clicking on them).

Once it was working, the process was quite easy:

(1) Created an account.

(2) Searched for unclaimed money by using IC number. Only two searches are allowed per day.

(3) From the search results, I selected all those I wanted to claim. My mum had 3 accounts (all were bank accounts) but one was joint account. I had one from Measat.

(4) For each account, attached the mandatory documents i.e. copy of IC front and back in one document and a copy of bank statement of an active bank account which  I wanted the money to be transferred into. There were other documents listed but they were optional.

(5) Submitted application.

(6) Received email from the department reminding me to upload the necessary documents.

(7) Received email form the department that all was in order and so money would be transferred within 30 days.

(5) Received money.