A few years back I wanted to claim my long service leave to fund living costs while I recovered from medical issues. Having my account number/details, I called the company to arrange payment and was informed that my account no longer existed then left me on hold to enquire about my case. Upon returning they informed me that it was handed over to the government authorities because I hadn’t made a payment into the account for some time making it inactive.

When asking where, they just said it was in a government department and I could go and search for it to claim, however they couldn’t provide any further details. I went searching, and after some time, located the account, government department and details to process the claim for refund.

What I discovered was that it was quite a complex & daunting process with my (then) inexperience with the matter. It caused a lot of worries not knowing how to go about recovering the money which I needed urgently at the time, I spent many hours searching for the money and when I found it I prepared the documents that were asked for and sent them off with the claim. Weeks later I received a letter requesting more identity proof documents and because I didn't have the original registration document, needed to get a statutory declaration to identify that I was the person on the document that I had and was certified. Everything appeared to be compounded and complicated for me at this time, also concerning. I understood that this was to ensure they were giving it to the right person, but the extra documentation duplication seemed pointless. Anyhow, I prepared the extra requested documents to complete the claim and in time my money was recovered and refunded to me.
This led me to find out if this was a common issue for other people and I found, that in fact, it was very common for people not to know that they have lost money, also many were unaware or forgotten about the accounts they had. I also found that people knew that they had accounts but could no longer find or access them in the usual way.

Over time I questioned and listened to many people with their experiences of lost superannuation accounts, long service leave accounts, bank accounts, insurance payments, refunds from bonds, refunds from utility credits/overpayments etc, and found it to be a common issue. I wanted to provide a service to process a claim for unrecovered money to alleviate the hassle and worry with the process for people, identify extra documents needed before submission to speed up the successful claim. Unfortunately, often the requirements are different, there will always be a void sometimes requiring further documents to complete a claim. I decided to look into it further with the goal to assist and help other people.  And so was born Link Refunds.