I hereby would like to exercise my Fifth Amendment rights, for fear that I might incriminate myself...and besides that, my computer crashed.
The dog ate my e-mails.
IRS AUDITOR: “I would like to see all the data that you have to back up the deductions you are claiming on your income tax. Two hundred thousand dollars seems a bit excessive for business entertainment expenses if you are only grossing three hundred and fifty thousand a year.”
ME: “Actually I will not be able to provide that. I scan all my data into my computer. I do not backup my data nor keep any hard copies. You are just going to have to trust me on this.” My hard drive crashed. I did send all this data to my auditor and 6 other people in the company. Unfortunately all their hard drives crashed. We sent the hard drives to IT specialist to recover the information. Unfortunately not only were they unable to recover the informaion but inadvertantly recycled the hard drives. They do not even know where they are now. I just hate it when this happens.”
IRS AUDITOR: “Do you have a server that all your computers are connected to?”
ME: “Yes”
IRS AUDITOR: “It will be easy to get the data from the server or the back up server to the main server.”
ME: “They crashed also.”
IRS AUDITOR: “Well okay, I trust you and will allow the 200,000 dollar deduction.”