Utah lawmakers have a long list of things to do in their upcoming session, but we'd encourage them to tackle an easy issue that annoys consumers and drains billions of dollars from wallets nationwide: expiration dates and service fees on gift cards and certificates.

The cards are a bigger problem than you might think, and they're something legislators can effectively address.

Gift cards reportedly were the third most popular item this season, behind clothing and the CD/DVD category. Consumers were expected to spend more than $26 billion on gift cards.

But people last year lost as much as $8 billion on cards that expired or were not used. That's more than double the annual losses from the $3.5 billion in debit and credit card fraud.

An estimate by Marshal Cohen of NPD Group said that 16 percent of all gift card recipients don't redeem them. It's called "breakage."

According to a report in the Register-Guard, a newspaper in Eugene, Ore., Home Depot was the first publicly owned retailer to report gift card breakage in 2005, claiming $43 million in profit for unused cards from 1998 through 2001. Williams-Sonoma Inc., took a second-quarter gain of $12 million in 2006 for unredeemed cards, the newspaper reported.

Consumer Reports conducted a survey last year that indicated 27 percent of those who received gift cards as holiday gifts in 2006 still had not redeemed them, the report said.

Maybe you're in that group. Or worse, you actually tried to redeem a card and couldn't. You went to the store but were unpleasantly surprised to find that the card had expired or that service fees had eaten up much or all of its value.

You may well have fumed that you hadn't done anything with the card, so what "service" was given? Or you may have wondered why it had an expiration date. Gift cards are like cash, aren't they?

Well, no, but they should be. Most large companies use an accounting method that lists the gift card not as cash but a liability until you redeem it. So unused cards can distort balance sheets. The fees or expiration dates clear the liabilities off the corporate books. Companies whose bookkeeping registers the cards as cash have no such excuse.

But a retailer's conundrum should not become a customer's problem. The actual cash remains in corporate coffers. It earns interest.

That has prompted some states to take action. The Utah Legislature last year passed a law requiring that gift cards display expiration dates. That's a step in the right direction, but more needs to be done.

Illinois and New Mexico passed laws requiring cards to last at least five years before expiring. California has one of the strongest laws, altogether prohibiting expiration dates and service fees on most gift certificates and gift cards. Last year, Oregon joined with California.

In all, 30 states have some sort of limitation on expiration dates or fees, while another seven require that fees and expirations be disclosed.

This kind of pressure seems to be prompting corporations to adopt better policies. To their credit, many major retailers such as Barnes & Noble, Blockbuster, Kmart and Toys R' Us have dropped expiration dates and service fees on gift cards, and we trust that other companies will follow suit. One Herald employee reported that Gap accepted a gift card that was 10 years old.

Companies benefit from making the cards easier to handle while reassuring consumers that they're being treated fairly when they buy or use a card.

Some corporations reportedly would prefer that the federal government set the standards, but federal intervention should be the last resort. State laws seem to have had the desired effect. Utah can join in by passing a law to help protect residents and make these popular gift items more useful and less annoying.

Gift cards were purchased with cash in exchange for future merchandise. The burden should be on the business to provide merchandise for that cash whenever the consumer wants it, not on the consumer to conform to an artificial set of rules justifying a form of corporate theft.