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US Travelers Left a Whopping $1 Million at Airport Security Last Year

United States News Airports + Flying
by Alex Bresler Aug 26, 2020

Finding a lost $20 bill on the street feels like winning the lottery. Now, imagine how the TSA must be feeling after collecting almost $1 million in unclaimed funds during the last fiscal year.

The lotto-sized figure includes both domestic and foreign currency, in paper bills and change, that was left behind at airport security checkpoints across the United States. Granted, roughly $900,000 was in US dollars. Of that, nearly $100,000 was collected at New York’s John F. Kennedy International Airport. The San Francisco, Miami, Las Vegas, and Dallas-Fort Worth airports collected the next-highest amounts, all between $40,000 and $53,000.

Every year, the TSA is required to report how much unclaimed money it collected, which can then be used toward TSA expenses. According to the Fiscal Year 2020 Report to Congress, the administration had over $3.5 million to spend as of September 2019, with plans to spend more than $2 million of those funds on training and development.

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