When Seth emailed to ask why they were just now contacting him, he received this surprising response (emphasis ours):

A software glitch prevented Buy.com from billing some customers over the last couple of years. Buy.com is going to bill them soon. The only customers that were affected by this were those who used partial payment with a GC and then paid the balance with their Credit Cards (which were never really charged).

So there ya go: if you used a gift card at Buy.com in the "last couple of years" and settled the difference with a credit card, Buy.com may be hitting your account later this month in an attempt to finally get their books straight.

(Photo: Getty)

Forbes' Top 10 Recession-Proof Jobs:

1. Sales Representative
2. Software Design and Development
3. Nursing
4. Accounting Executive
5. Accounting Staff
6. Networking and Systems Administration
7. Administrative Assistant
8. Business Analysis, Software Implementation
9. Business Analysis, Research
10. Finance Staff

Recession-Proof Jobs [Forbes]
(Photo: moxythecat )

The laws differ from state to state, and companies tend not to report on gift card income, so it's hard to get an accurate idea of what happens to all those forgotten or abandoned cards. New York state is trying to push other states to support a "uniform federal solution" that would let all states grab a slice of the gift card pie—which certainly can't impress businesses, who must report gift card amounts as liabilities until they're spent or expired.

Who gets to keep that money depends on where the retailer locates its card division. Some states, including Delaware and New York, demand unspent balances be sent to them after periods ranging from two to five years. (If the card is used after that point, the retailer generally honors it but can apply to the state for a reimbursement.) Other states, including Florida and Virginia, allow retailers to hang on to the money. In those cases, after periods ranging from 18 months to seven years, the retailer can move the money from the balance sheet directly into operating income.

Some businesses, however, aren't so easily mollified.

Three businesses that lost data during the update snafu have filed a lawsuit against Intuit and have asked a federal judge to grant the case class-action status. The firms — Create-A-Card Inc. in New York, AGSJ Inc. in California and Philanthropic Focus LLC in Florida — charged Intuit with reacting slowly to news from users of the buggy update and said that they each had lost irreplaceable data.

[Re. "no buggy updates": At least not on the user side—we know that doesn't guarantee anything...]

It shows some kind of American cabaret singer leading a group of E&Y employees in a ballrooms singalong.

"Oh Happy Day" is repeated about 5,000 times. It is sometimes punctuated by "When Ernst & Young showed me a better way," "show leadership" and, "working together." In the background the employees sing and laugh, interspersed with black and white video of employees enjoying a mass dinner and executives carrying folders.

We've never felt happier to work at Ernst and Young! — BEN POPKEN

But LegalAffairs.org has an interesting article up saying a real-world IRS tax might not only be justifiable, but forthcoming as these games become more ubiquitous. Here's how Julian Dibbell's accounting experiment starts:

JUNE 2003. I SET MYSELF THE FOLLOWING CHALLENGE, posting it on my web log for the world to see: "On April 15, 2004, I will truthfully report to the IRS that my primary source of income is the sale of imaginary goods and that I earn more from it, on a monthly basis, than I have ever earned as a professional writer."

In the course of this project, I made a total of $11,000 selling on eBay the items I won playing a game called Ultima Online, $3,900 of which was in the final, most profitable month. I reported my profit to the IRS, and I paid the requisite taxes. But after I did so, a troublesome set of questions continued to nag at me for which even IRS publication 525, entitled "Taxable and Nontaxable Income," couldn't provide answers.

This was remarkable, for publication 525 would appear to contain every conceivable form of income known to accounting. To read it once is to realize that you know nothing about income. Here you'll find a description of gains, ill-gotten and otherwise, so irregular that they can be taxed only according to that form of guesswork known as fair market value. Here are stocks, options, retirement watches, and stolen goods ("If you steal property, you must report its fair market value in your income in the year you steal it unless in the same year, you return it to its rightful owner").