[bkirkbri]

Agreed. Over the past 9 years I've had to implement double, triple and end-of-the-month checking on PayPal to be sure that we have some reconciled idea of reality with respect to payments.

What's worse, their system essentially rewrites history over time. This means that rather than keeping a ledger of payment events, they change the dates and amounts depending of payment status / reversal /etc. Querying later in the week and the data is different. For the same charge.

I ended up keeping an event log of everything we ever get from them (IPN, API polling, reports) and synthesizing that into a current snapshot at query time. The code is riddled with comments saying, essentially, "this charge, then return, then recharge and failure means that the payment is OK".