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good faith attempt at reconstruction, petitioner merely rested on
his claim that his records had been stolen. We believe that a
taxpayer in petitioner’s position, facing challenged basis claims
exceeding $1 million in the aggregate, would have made a more
serious effort to reconstruct unless he knew that such efforts
would tend to disprove his claims. The records of petitioner’s
financial transactions that have been proffered in this case were
generally obtained through the efforts of respondent alone and
substantially rebut petitioner’s basis claims.
In addition, petitioner’s claim that the records
substantiating his basis had been stolen was undermined when, at
trial, he proffered various invoices purporting to be
substantiation of costs of later-built yachts that, upon close
inspection, bore dates that fell within the time period for which
records were claimed to have been taken. Moreover, the repeated
instances where the dates on invoices proffered as evidence had
been altered is further evidence of petitioner’s fraudulent
intent.
We also take account of the fact that petitioner was
convicted of felony forgery in 1996 for forging the signatures of
persons residing near the country club he operated on that
business’s application for a liquor license.
In an apparent effort to address the pervasive lack of
records in this case, petitioner has also sought to portray
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