Page:Delaware v. Pennsylvania (2023).pdf/16

12 of similarity between money orders and the Disputed Instruments; in addition, they both would otherwise escheat inequitably under the secondary common-law rule due to the business practices of the company holding the funds.

The context in which the FDA arises underscores the meaningfulness of this similarity. Our common-law rules were permitting inequitable escheatment (insofar as our primary rule mistakenly relied on the assumption that the holders of such instruments regularly collected creditors’ address information), and the statute that Congress enacted in the wake of our Pennsylvania ruling details the inequitable escheatment problem. Thus, the FDA regulates “money orders” (however that term is ordinarily defined) not just for the sake of regulating those particular financial instruments, but because inequitable escheatment occurs under our common-law rules if financial instruments do not have address information that can facilitate distribution to the State of entitlement when they are abandoned, and the entities issuing and selling money orders often do not keep adequate records. The lack of related creditor address information was a key feature of the money orders that we evaluated when we were asked to revisit our common-law escheatment rules in Pennsylvania, 407 U. S., at 214. So it should come as no surprise that it is likewise a key feature of the statute that Congress enacted to displace our common-law rules.

The inadequate-recordkeeping feature of money orders is also derived from the text of the FDA itself. The statute references both our observation in Texas that, “as a matter of equity,” the proceeds of abandoned intangible property should be spread “among the several States,” §2501(3), and Pennsylvania’s subsequent recognition that “the proceeds of such instruments are not being distributed to the States entitled thereto,” §2501(4). The FDA explains that this inequity was occurring because “the books and records of