The U.S. Senate Appropriations Committee voted last week to advance the Financial Services and General Government funding bill for fiscal year 2024, which includes a $14 million provision to establish a “lost and found” for retirement accounts.
The lost and found provision was a key element of SECURE 2.0, legislation passed in December which was part of an omnibus appropriations bill including a package of bipartisan reforms crafted between Senate Appropriations Committee Chair Sen. Patty Murray (D-Wash.) and Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions (HELP) Ranking Member Sen. Richard Burr (R-N.C.).
“[T]he draft legislation provides $15 million for the Bureau of Fiscal Service to implement a program to find lost savings bonds, $14 million of which is for Sen. Murray’s SECURE 2.0 legislation—signed into law in December—to help people locate retirement accounts from past employers that they are missing or have lost track of,” said an announcement from Sen. Murray’s office.
The bill also includes funding for the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) designed to combat financial fraud, particularly the kind that seniors are vulnerable to, Murray said.
“[W]e also need to protect [Americans’] nest eggs—which is why this bill includes funding for FTC which protects Americans from consumer fraud—especially seniors who are common targets of criminals, and funding for the program I established in my bipartisan retirement bill last year to help connect people with retirement accounts from past employers they are missing,” Murray said in a statement.
The committee advanced the bill in a vote of 29-0. It also includes $17 billion to fund operations at the U.S. Department of the Treasury, the District of Columbia, the Small Business Administration, and more than two dozen other independent federal agencies.
A full list of all the agencies and departments that would receive funding from the bill has been made available by Appropriations Committee leadership. The bill has been placed on the Senate’s legislative calendar for a vote, but the date is not publicly available.
