Guest Poster contributed;

It appears the state Treasurer’s office has joined the effort to make on-line access even dumber.  The lack of ergonomic design in website development shows those of us who have to use their sites, how little they themselves actually use them. Let’s explain, the state of South Dakota, in an effort to collect funds from unsuspecting individuals and businesses decided to make it harder for the owners of lost funds to actually reclaim them.  The excellent State Treasurer at the time actually fought all the way to the Supreme Court to protect the average citizens against the greedy hands of bankers and the Governor’s office.

As a result, the state, bankers and other keepers of our assets have collected millions of dollars through hard to use processes.  Recently I had to use the SD State Treasurer’s Unclaimed Property website to assist in reclaiming a savings account.

What we found was amazing.

No wonder so little is returned to the rightful owners.  The state actually used to actively assist and find the owners – but no more.  They now have this cute website where it only allows you to only search by exact spelling.  Do you know what is wrong about this?  This takes data from many databases where the names are misspelled.  In our Scandinavian land of *sen and *son plus the Irish apostrophe names leaves us with no way to accurately find lost assets Why can’t we search by address? Why can’t we search by city? Zip code County?  Phonic spelling?

How about searching by the bank or business name where deposit was made? If there was an ability to search by business where property was found, we citizens and customers could actually discover how bad their databases are.  So why isn’t there an ability to search by business?

Treasurer Sattgast must have asked SOS Gant how to design an ALEC based website.  This is an insider’s website for insiders.  The design of this site is not for the average user to use.  Try it for yourself and see how bad it is.

4 Thoughts on “SD State Treasurer Sattgast must have asked SOS Gant to design a website

  1. Pathloss on October 20, 2012 at 8:16 pm said:

    There was a time when government served citizens. We must now protect ourselves. One must never pay in to much and cheat often in order to survive. It was so much easier when there were few rich & several classes of the rest of us. Now there are some feudal lords and most are peasants to keep them rich. These conditions deserve a revolution.

  2. Your post got the geek in me curious about who would make such a site. I really can’t believe there wouldn’t be an advanced search option for the database.

    So I went to the developer of this website, which happens to be factor360 Technology out of Pierre. The SD State Treasurer site appears to run on a web based Content Management System called 360webCMS. The SD State Treasurer site is listed in their examples section.

    I looked at other samples of government sites and one happens to be the SD Sex Offenders site. This site has a lot of search options. This shows the WebCMS product is capable of better searches. In fact you search by Last Name, First Name, Alias, Address, County, City, Zip Code. You can put any amount of info in each blank to narrow the search.

    So, does this mean the Treasurers site is setup poorly on purpose? I’m not sure about that. At most I think its just a lack of caring about delivering their product. It could also be problems querying to a remote database, but I doubt it (those type of problems can be fixed).

    Just my two cents.

    Now back to working on my research paper…

  3. There once was a man named Harding, with counter checks fed by unclaimed funds he was Hoarding, this rumored disease, was not working to please, the descendants of of dear old dead dad.

    That above rumor came about after State Treas Richard Butler was shut down by BJ when Butler found unbalanced accounts in the ops of Bills Wooed Soo Foo banking industry.

  4. Pingback: How ALEC member/state legislator Corey Brown w/ Denny DoGood suckered in the ‘smart’ ones over a $30 million dollar windfall for the state (H/T – GP) — South DaCola

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