Osama A. Mowafi - Page 6




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          which he prepared in connection with his audit to support the               
          hours of personal time which he purportedly devoted to the rental           
          properties.  The logs list 2,102.5 hours and 2,116.5 hours of               
          personal time that petitioner spent during the respective years             
          working on the rental properties.  We find these logs                       
          untrustworthy and decline to rely blindly upon them to reach                
          petitioner’s desired result.3  Cf. Rapp v. Commissioner, T.C.               
          Memo. 1999-249.  Petitioner, for example, prepared these logs 2             
          to 3 years after the fact admittedly on the basis of speculation            
          and with an end result in mind (i.e., the need to arrive at a               
          certain minimum number of hours being attributable to the rental            
          properties so that he would meet both the more-than-half-the-               
          personal-service requirement of section 469(c)(7)(B)(i) and the             
          750-hour requirement of section 469(c)(7)(B)(ii)), and he                   
          concedes that the times set forth therein may be off by as much             
          as 20 percent.  The 1994 log also conflicts dramatically with an            
          earlier log that he prepared listing the time that he purportedly           
          spent on the rental properties; the prior log lists 1,096.5 hours           
          of personal services that he performed as to the rental                     



               3 As to petitioner’s testimony, we find much of it to be               
          improbable, questionable, uncorroborated, inconsistent, and self-           
          serving.  Under the circumstances, we are not required to, and we           
          do not, rely on that testimony to support his position herein.              
          See Cebollero v. Commissioner, 967 F.2d 986, 989 (4th Cir. 1992),           
          affg. T.C. Memo. 1990-618; Gatling v. Commissioner, 286 F.2d 139,           
          143-144 (4th Cir. 1961), affg. T.C. Memo. 1959-224; Tokarski v.             
          Commissioner, 87 T.C. 74, 77 (1986).                                        





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