San Francisco says it owes late Apple CEO and founder Steve Jobs $174 for overpaid parking tickets, and Jobs is just one among thousands of people in the city who are eligible to receive reimbursements for citation overpayments.
The San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency has annoucned that over 200,000 parking tickets were overpaid from Jan. 1, 1995, to June 30, 2012, with the agency posting an alphabetical list online that includes all the citizens and companies who can receive cash for the erroneously paid tickets.
The list shows overpayments ranging from $15 to as high as over $2,000, and includes famous citizens in addition to Jobs such as Uber CEO Travis Kalanick, Governor Jerry Brown and Attorney General Kamala Harris.
The name of Jobs, however, stands out because of what he did to avoid getting parking tickets, including changing his car every six months to take advantage of a loophole in California law that prevents the installation of license plates on vehicles.
The total amount of unclaimed funds collected from overpayments and duplicate payments is about $6.1 million. Citizens and companies unable to claim the money owed to them by the SFMTA by March 3 will be forfeiting the reimbursement to be added to the agency's operating budget, so it would be best to check the list and see if cash is heading your way.
For those who see their names on the list, the Citation Overpayments page of the official SFMTA website said a verification letter should be arriving in the mail. However, as an alternative and to meet the March 3 deadline for reimbursements, a claim form can be submitted online through the same page.
There is no information on the page on what would happen if the cited person in the list has passed away, as is the case with Jobs.
According to Paul Rose, a spokesman for the SFMTA, the agency has previously attempted to contact the people eligible for reimbursements back in 2004. However, the SFMTA never heard back from the people, either because the people did not respond or the contact information available to them was outdated.
