Forbes has an amusing piece and cautionary tale about the time F. Lee Bailey represented himself in a tax matter.
The primary counter-evidence that Mr. Bailey produced at trial to support his position and contradict the agent on these miscellaneous adjustments was Quicken registers and cashflow reports for the 1993 through 2001 tax years. That is, he did not offer receipts or other transactional documents to substantiate the items on his return; he simply relied on his secondary Quicken records.
For several of the years he lacked even those records; but on the eve of trial in 2009, Mr. Bailey was finally able to “unlock” password-protected copies of his Quicken data base from which he made printouts for all nine years. The data on the three available printouts made earlier (printed in October 1997 for tax year1996, in October 2000 for tax year 1999, and in October 2001 for tax year 2000) and the data on the 2009 printouts for those same three years are not identical and cannot be correlated with each other. …….. And in any event, the corrected data (if they are correct) on the later printouts (if they really are later) do not correspond to the tax returns. ………Rather than correlating the 2009 printouts with the returns, Mr. Bailey simply criticizes the Commissioner’s position for failing to take into account the 2009 printouts.
The piece is also noteworthy for its creative use of video to spice up the story.
