By Owen Leitch
Of the $200,000 that will be issued to students who sold their books at the Used Book Room, roughly $50,000 will be leftover from unclaimed cheques.
“Come and get your money, this is student money and we don’t want to keep you from it,” said Rob Emerson, general manager of RyeSAC. “As of June 15, 2004, there was a little over $70,000 in previously issued cheques that hadn’t been picked up.”
By now some of that will have been claimed, but Emerson said that of the 4,000 cheques printed five months ago, a quarter of them haven’t been claimed.
The Used Book Room, which works on a consignment system, issues cheques three times per year for the books they sell on students’ behalf. When the cheques aren’t claimed before the pay period, they must be cancelled and re-issued.
The staff at the Used Book Room are puzzled by the cheques that end up hanging around for months-sometimes years. Emerson said the Used Book Room doesn’t win when people forget to claim their cash.
“[Forgotten cheques] end up as a paper debt on our books and skew things up for us,” he said. A cheque will be re-issued five times, or for a year and a half, before they are cancelled.
After that, a student can still get the cheque reprinted, but few ever bother. “It’s hard to believe people can forget about their money,” said Used Book Room employee Yusuf Jiwajee.
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