The New York state government is sitting on $20 billion of the public’s money, and an upstart challenger wants to give it all back.

Banks, insurers, and other companies often owe money to customers from inactive accounts, uncashed checks, security deposits, and other sources. If they don’t return it directly, they eventually have to hand it over to the state comptroller’s office, which takes over the job of getting the money back to its rightful owners.

Yet the mountain of cash keeps growing, and the governor and legislature routinely spend huge sums from the pot with little expectation of repaying it. Last fiscal year, lawmakers treated nearly $900 million in unclaimed funds as revenue to spend however they saw fit.

If the bill suddenly became due, it could blow a massive hole in the New York state budget.

And a recently declared comptroller candidate would take steps towards doing just that.

There’s a good chance that the New York State Comptroller is holding onto your money.

The comptroller’s office manages a giant pot of funds — about $20 billion — that businesses turned over to the state from sources like dormant bank accounts, uncashed checks, and unreturned security deposits. As I recently reported, New York state has essentially borrowed most of this money — and spent it.

But it’s very easy to see if a part of the $20 billion is yours.

It took nearly four months for New York to return $318.83 in stolen food assistance benefits to Anna Gelman. The day after she was finally refunded, her benefits were stolen again.

The 90-year-old from Brooklyn is now out $409.05, and due to congressional inaction, refunds are also no longer an option.

Gelman is among the thousands of New Yorkers who rely on the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP, to fill up their grocery carts only to discover that their benefits have been depleted by the time they get to checkout. She is also one of eight plaintiffs named in a federal lawsuit filed Thursday against the New York State Office of Temporary and Disability Assistance, which oversees SNAP across the state.

“I’m very angry, I don’t understand why the state doesn’t do anything,” said Gelman.

New York has been a target for a practice called skimming, in which thieves place hidden devices at registers to compromise payment cards. Emails obtained by Focus show the state has for years been considering a tech upgrade that could curb skimming, but has failed to take action.

Related: A Simple Fix Could Stop Millions in Food Stamp Theft. Will New York Commit?

Amid one of the most chaotic years for New York’s prison system in recent memory, the state legislature passed a limited omnibus prison reform bill Thursday night, hours before one of its chambers closed out its lawmaking for the year.

The bill is the legislature’s response to the state prison agency’s mounting scandals. In December, body-worn cameras captured corrections officers taking turns beating a handcuffed incarcerated man named Robert Brooks, who died hours later. The killing sparked nationwide outcry and served as a backdrop for months of tumultuous events that followed, including a three-week corrections officers strike, another alleged killing at the hands of prison guards, and two contentious legislative hearings.

Prison reform-minded lawmakers compiled a 23-bill package to address what they described as systemic issues underlying Brooks’s death. State Senate and Assembly leaders then picked seven of them, plus three other prison reform bills, to include in the omnibus. Both chambers passed that bill Thursday night, shortly before the Senate ended its annual legislative session early Friday morning. (The Assembly has delayed the end of its session to next week.)

Most of the provisions in the omnibus legislation center on beefing up prison oversight and transparency.

Related: As Dust Begins to Settle on Prison Chaos, Reformers Hold Somber Hearing

Over the past few months, New York Focus has been investigating the health insurance company Leading Edge Administrators. The company has little public footprint, but on May 1 became the default insurer for the hundreds of thousands of New Yorkers who work for the state-funded home health care program known as Consumer Directed Personal Assistance Program (CDPAP).

That makes it one of the largest health insurers in New York state, and a huge recipient of taxpayer money.

We found that Leading Edge, which sometimes goes by the name Omni Advantage, routinely underpays doctors and hospitals and passes the cost on to patients, sometimes leaving them with thousands of dollars of debt. To do so, the company employs practices virtually unheard of in the insurance industry that lead to frequent lawsuits against it.

In the course of our investigation, we spoke with doctors, patients, health insurance experts, and six of Leading Edge’s former employees. We also reviewed hundreds of pages of court records and insurance documents.

Here are five takeaways from our ongoing investigation.

Related: Have You Been Sued for Credit Card Debt? Your Fake Relative Might Know.

On a recent Tuesday afternoon, a team of volunteers armed with laptops helped New Yorkers shave hundreds or even thousands of dollars off their hospital bills by tapping into a little-known program called “charity care.”

Rose Gasner, a retired health care attorney who organized the free clinic at the central branch of the Brooklyn Public Library, called charity care a “best-kept secret.”

To keep their tax-exempt status, nonprofit hospitals must provide free or discounted health care to patients who fall under certain income limits. In New York, those who earn up to 400 percent of the federal poverty level are eligible — this year, that’s $62,600 for an individual or $128,600 for a family of four. Some hospitals go further, providing discounts to those who earn up to twice as much. Immigration status cannot be considered during the application process and both insured and uninsured patients are eligible.

The catch? Figuring out charity care exists in the first place.

Related: Need Help Paying Medical Bills? Here’s How Charity Care Works in New York.