I got served in the parking lot of the funeral home. My brother wants the farm. His position is that he worked the ground uncompensated from 2005 to 2020 and is owed for it. He attached fifteen years of “labor records” he had written himself. Three of those years he was living in North Carolina. His own tax returns—which he attached as Exhibit F to prove income loss—list a Charlotte address for 2011, 2012, and 2013.
He was claiming eleven hundred hours of fieldwork during those years. I brought both exhibits to Dad’s accountant, who had prepared his returns since 1994. He looked at them for about ten seconds and then asked me whether my brother had ever actually worked on the farm during those years. I said not that I knew of. The accountant pulled out the farm records and showed me something my brother hadn’t included: there were no payroll entries, fuel purchases, equipment records, or crop records showing him on the property during any of those eleven hundred hours.
Then he checked the tax returns. My brother hadn’t just listed a North Carolina address. He had claimed a full-time job there for all three years. His employer’s name, wages, and withholding were right there on the returns. The accountant said he remembered those years because my brother had called from North Carolina every spring asking Dad to send him money for his rent. Meanwhile, the “labor records” claimed he was working six days a week on our farm.
My attorney filed the accountant’s records and my brother’s own tax returns side by side. At the hearing, the judge asked him how he could have worked eleven hundred hours on the farm while simultaneously reporting full-time employment four hundred miles away. My brother said the tax returns were “just paperwork.” Then the accountant spoke up and said something that changed everything: “Your Honor, I prepared those returns from documents your brother personally gave me. If those records are false, he didn’t just forget about the farm. He lied to the IRS too.”
