AOL might face class-action law suit
Belleville, Ill. A lawsuit seeking to potentially cover hundreds of thousands of AOL subscribers accuses the Time Warner Inc. unit of illegally billing customers by creating secondary accounts for them without their consent.
The lawsuit, filed last month in St. Clair County Circuit Court on behalf of 10 AOL customers in six states, claims the company confused and deceived customers about the charges, stalled them from canceling unauthorized accounts and refused to return questioned fees.
“AOL exploits its subscribers’ confidential billing information to unlawfully generate additional revenue by charging subscribers for additional membership accounts that they neither order nor request,” the lawsuit alleges, calling the scheme “common, uniform and continuing.”
The lawsuit, seeking class-action status, mirrors more than a dozen other actions that have been pending in state and federal courts throughout the country, said Stuart Talley, a Sacramento, Calif., attorney representing the plaintiffs in the Illinois lawsuit. All of the federal cases were consolidated in California two years ago, Talley said.
IRS sets gas reimbursement rate for next year
Washington The Internal Revenue Service on Friday set the deductible rate that workers can claim next year for using personal cars on business at 44.5 cents a mile.
That’s less than a temporary rate that the tax agency put in place for the last four months of this year, reflecting higher prices at gas pumps nationwide. The temporary rate is 48.5 cents a mile.
Next year’s rate is higher than the 40.5 cents a mile in effect for most of this year. Many businesses use the IRS rate as a benchmark for reimbursing employees for travel costs.
IRS Commissioner Mark Everson said in September, when he announced a temporary rate increase for the last few months of the year, that next year’s rate could be lower if gas prices went down.
The rate for figuring deductible medical or moving expenses will be 18 cents a mile next year.
Employment picture improves in November
The nation’s businesses cranked up hiring in November after a two-month lull, a sign the labor market is back in the groove as the ill effects of the Gulf Coast hurricanes fade.
Employers expanded payrolls by 215,000 jobs last month, the most since July. The unemployment rate held steady at 5 percent.
The Labor Department’s fresh snapshot of the jobs situation, released Friday, suggested employers are in a better hiring mood now that energy prices have retreated from record highs and disruptions to commerce from the hurricanes are easing.
In October, employers added just 44,000 jobs, even fewer than the government reported a month ago. In September — the month that bore the brunt of Katrina, the most costly natural disaster in U.S. history — payrolls grew by 17,000, according to revised figures. While that was an improvement from the loss of 8,000 jobs previously reported, it still marked the weakest job growth in two years.
The rebound in jobs follows other good economic news of late. A government report earlier this week showed the economy grew at a robust 4.3 percent pace in the third quarter, its best performance in more than a year, despite the hurricanes.
Workers’ average hourly earnings increased to $16.32 in November, up 3.2 percent from the same month last year. That was the biggest rise since March 2003.