Hairston v. Commissioner: why a padded hours log lost

By Max Medvedev · 6 Aug 2026

Hairston v. Commissioner, T.C. Memo 2019-104, is the padding case. The log was stuffed with one-hour entries for trivial tasks, carried lines like "supervising painting," and was written up weekly rather than daily. The padding was not simply trimmed off the total — it cost the whole log its credibility, and the deduction went with it.

What happened

The taxpayer kept a participation log to support material participation. Three things about how it was kept decided the case: trivial tasks were each recorded as an hour, at least one entry described supervising painting rather than performing work, and the entries were made weekly instead of on the day the work happened.

That is the fact pattern. It is small, ordinary, and it is exactly how most logs get built.

What the court held

The log did not carry the position. What makes Hairston worth its own page is the shape of the loss: the padded entries were not surgically removed while the rest survived. The padding tainted the record as a whole. Once a court can see that a log was assembled to reach a number, it stops reading the log as an account of what happened.

That is the eleventh documentation rule in this whole area of law, and the one owners find least intuitive: quality beats quantity. 800 hours you can support are worth more than 1,200 you cannot, because over-claiming invites the court to discard everything — including the hours that were real.

The tell

Three behaviours, each visible on the face of the log before anyone checks a single fact against the outside world.

The one-hour default. Every trivial task priced at exactly one hour is not a measurement, it is a rounding habit. Real work is not shaped that way: a guest message is four minutes, a restock run is forty, a full turnover is three hours. Uniform durations are the same tell that sank Mirch v. Commissioner, T.C. Memo 2025-128, where a flat seven hours per turnover was claimed regardless of whether the stay had been one night or fourteen. Identical numbers are the signature of a log filled in after the fact, because only estimation produces them.

A description that describes watching. "Supervising painting" names presence, not work performed. Passive observation does not count, and neither does being available — the standard the examiner applies is regular, continuous, and substantial participation in the operation. An entry whose own words describe oversight of someone else's labour argues against itself.

Weekly, not daily. A log written on Sunday for the week behind it is a reconstruction on a seven-day delay. The regulation is generous here and the courts are not: Reg. §1.469-5T(f)(4) allows proof "by any reasonable means" and says daily time reports "are not required," yet the Tax Court routinely rejects post-hoc reconstruction. The gap between the regulation and the case law is the whole game, and a weekly write-up lands on the wrong side of it.

What this means for your records

Duration is a measurement, not a default value. Start and stop times, sized to the task, produce the uneven, unattractive numbers that a real week actually generates — 0.3 hours, 2.4 hours, 0.75 hours. A log full of those reads as a record. A log of clean ones reads as an estimate wearing a record's clothes.

The description has to name work performed and point at something outside the log. "Coordinated cleaner for the 14 Mar checkout" with the scheduling message attached is a different object from "supervising cleaning." One cites a record; the other asks to be believed. An entry that names the external record it relies on is evidence-backed; an entry that names nothing is an estimate, and it should say so.

Same-day entry is what makes both of those possible. The artifact — the guest thread, the invoice, the supply receipt, the maintenance ticket, the timestamped photo — is at hand on the day and gone by the weekend. This is also why a capture tool should never propose a duration for you: a prompt that suggests "1 hour" manufactures the exact pattern the linter exists to catch. The tap chooses the number, so identical durations cannot accumulate.

And the arithmetic that makes padding pointless: the workhorse test needs more than 100 hours and more than any other single individual — not a large number, a winning one. Padding rarely changes the outcome of that race, and Hairston is what it costs when it fails.

Check the record you already have

Every tell above is mechanical, which means it can be checked before anyone else checks it. Run your hours and reservation mix through the estimator to see which participation test your countable hours actually reach.

The full method — what counts, what never does, and what corroboration holds a log up — is in how to prove your short-term rental hours.