Page:Delaware v. Pennsylvania (2023).pdf/9

Rh solve the problem of inequitable escheatment by requiring Western Union to keep sufficient records. 407 U. S., at 214–215.

Congress passed the FDA two years after our decision in Pennsylvania to abrogate this Court’s common-law escheatment practices and adopt a more equitable rule, at least for some products. 12 U. S. C. §2501; Delaware v. New York, 507 U. S. 490, 510 (1993); S. Rep. No. 93–505, pp. 1–3 (1973).

In the text of the statute, Congress declared that, “as a matter of equity among the several States,” the States “wherein the purchasers of money orders and traveler’s checks reside should … be entitled to the proceeds of such instruments in the event of abandonment.” §2501(3). Yet, the statute further recognized that such an equitable distribution was not happening under the common-law rules, to the detriment of interstate commerce, because “the books and records of banking and financial organizations and business associations engaged in issuing and selling money orders and traveler’s checks do not, as a matter of business practice, show the last known addresses of purchasers of such instruments.” §2501(1); see §2501(4).

Notably, instead of keeping our Texas default rule and mandating recordkeeping requirements for debtors, as we had suggested in Pennsylvania, the FDA addressed the inequitable escheatment problem by establishing a different set of escheatment rules that displaces this Court’s primary and secondary escheatment rules whenever applicable. See §2503. It states that “[w]here any sum is payable on a money order, traveler’s check, or other similar written instrument (other than a third party bank check) on which a banking or financial organization or a business association is directly liable,” the primary escheatment rule is the place-of-purchase rule that Pennsylvania had proposed in