Gift cards are a $100 billion business, Consumer Reports has found, yet 27 percent go unredeemed. This leaves billions as “unclaimed property” to which states, like Maine, have staked claims, in the name of consumer protection.

So in May, per statute, Maine’s treasurer David Lemoine asked major retailers for the state’s share: 60 percent of cards inactive for two years following the year of its last use. For example, a card valued at $30 would trigger $18 to the state, with the company keeping the rest. But retailers balked.

This is bad for Maine, which anticipated – through a convoluted estimation – unused gift cards would yield about $28 million toward the budget. (An amount derived from calculating Maine’s percentage of national retail sales against estimates of unredeemed card value.)

Consumers, however, can redeem cards into perpetuity – Maine also outlaws expiration dates. Only Maine and Connecticut, however, have tried to make companies remit inactive card value into unclaimed property.

Connecticut ended up in court, where Maine appears headed, as well.

Gift cards, also, are unlike traditional unclaimed properties (bank accounts, safe deposit boxes, etc.) in which the legal owner is recorded. They are treated like cash – the possessor is the owner.

That means the actual purchasers of gift cards are unknown, and therefore unprotected, by Maine law.

Since cards cannot expire, retailers can also get stuck redeeming value they’ve already paid the state. This gives the company grounds for reimbursement. In 2007, the state reimbursed $843,000 to seven Maine gift-card sellers.

And so retailers are expected to make payments they may seek later as a reimbursement, anyway.

Yet it’s legal – and encouraged, Lemoine says – for consumers to redeem older gift cards, at full value.

It’s a complicated system, which stems from government’s attempts to siphon funds from the revenue windfall companies can receive from unused gift cards. (Best Buy, for example, reported $43 million in revenue from unused cards over the last two years, according to Consumer Reports.)

There are laudable consumer protections in place – outlawing expiration and hidden “dormancy” fees do ensure consumers get what they paid for. Yet invoking unclaimed property laws so retailers transfer funds paid to them by consumers, which do not expire, doesn’t seem like a consumer protection policy.

It seems like looking for tribute. Especially since actual card purchasers – the consumers who should be protected under unclaimed property laws, like bank account holders – are unidentifiable under current practices.

Maine’s overzealous expectations for the return from gift cards, and the subsequent apprehension by retailers, has left the state in a $28 million budget bind, which lawmakers must tackle in January.

A more worthy inquiry, however, is into the thinking that brought Maine here in the first place.

Was it for consumer protection?

Or was it for a piece of the action?