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Comment by xtiansimon | Hacker News Reader

> “You say that, but you haven't explained how it is a liability, and I consider it debatable.”

I gave chapter and verse.

But let me try to help with the intuition. It’s about accounting. That’s all. Not your intuition. Not my preference. Ready?

Record. It’s the agreed upon rules for how some named monetary _thing_, which is constant flow and here defined, can be said to have a value x at time t. Gift card is a liability until used when it is recognized as revenue. Period. Full stop. End recording.

All the laws, maybe your law of how long they should keep the liability, are down stream from this. Everything else is chaos and confusion.

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> Gift card is a liability until used

It's your biased interpretation that it's a liability. A clever firm may use a safe fraction of it to collect interest via a bank or directly via treasuries. This turns your logic on its head. The longer the gift card stays unused, the more revenue it generates via interest. Just enough needs to be kept as cash to fund customer expenses for the next two quarters.

You are arguing about accounting jargon. The card has to be tracked, the entries that track it fall under the label "liability".

The issue is that the author is using it as an excuse to justify stealing unspent customer funds after one year. It's not an appropriate excuse.

> “…stealing unspent customer funds after one year.”

There’s our common ground! The common sense question: why is 1 year legal when there is a federal law saying it’s must be 5 years?

The funds must ideally last forever for the life of the firm. I wouldn't even buy a gift card if it going to expire in five years.

Amazon is another prominent example. It gift card in the US never expires and has no fee. It's a good place for stashing funds. Do you think Amazon doesn't have accountants?

For logical reasons I have noted before, there is no unmanageable risk to any sizable firm with it.

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