Excuses that don't work

[jainen]

In TC Memo 2008-209, the taxpayer only gave her preparer a hand-written memo of employee expenses three years in a row. When the IRS asked for substantiation, she explained that she had shredded all the receipts after entering them in Quicken, but -- darn! -- her computer got stolen. She also said she couldn't get canceled checks because the bank would charge her $2.

The court was not sympathetic, even though the taxpayer insisted that she had done it this way for many years "and had not had a problem with her tax reporting before." (I think the judge was prejudiced because he said that the expenses were "so large as to be improbable" in relation to her income, which sounds very subjective to me.)