Don't you have this backwards, or do I?
Software development is now going to be treated as R&D, which means that costs have to be amortized. That's not an tax advantage, it's a disadvantage. All the other businesses you list get to expense their labour costs. But we agree, software dev should not be treated differently.
I wonder how this one will pan out.
Let's say you build out a landing page with a way for folks to input their email address which demonstrates interest in your product. You've released it and people can sign up.
Did it launch? You could make case it did and now you're iterating on the product from here on out. You've launched phase 1 of the product which is probing for demand.
Any software development costs related to improving the product by providing new features must be amortized. Only clear bug fixes can have costs that are expensable.
This is made extremely clear in the IRS guidance document.
>Research and development is the set of innovative activities undertaken by corporations or governments in developing new services or products, and improving existing ones.
>R&D activities differ from institution to institution, with two primary models of an R&D department either staffed by engineers and tasked with directly developing new products, or staffed with industrial scientists and tasked with applied research in scientific or technological fields, which may facilitate future product development. R&D differs from the vast majority of corporate activities in that it is not intended to yield immediate profit, and generally carries greater risk and an uncertain return on investment.
and as you see "R&D department either staffed by engineers and tasked with directly developing new products, or staffed with industrial scientists and tasked with applied research in scientific or technological fields, which may facilitate future product development"
developing new products falls under R&D
> The whole thing backwards, he gets.
Not too surprising, I guess.
I don't have a fully formed opinion on this aspect of the taxation, but it's pretty evident that this is out of the norm.
If you run a plumbing company, make $100K in revenue, pay a plumber $100K, you have no profits, owe no corporate taxes.
If you run a software company, make $100K in revenue, pay a software engineer $100K, section 174, which just went into effect recently, means you now owe taxes on $90K of profit. This is because you must spread dev costs over 5 years, you can’t deduct them in the year they happened.
Have you forgotten the D in R&D? Software engineers are building the product. That’s development.
What do you mean by “genuine scientific research”? I suppose you think ML researchers aren’t doing “genuine science” because they wear hoodies instead of lab coats?
My programmers build software.
Should builders building a house amortise their development work?
Though, the country where I work and live, R&D has more profitable tax treatment, your employee costs are a same year expense, but you can get some relief on the rest if your tax bill if you proactively document what's R&D about your work and it doesn't get rejected by the tax department
I get the point but software really is different. Rarely ever are you building the same thing over, both from a “structural” or “architectural” perspective and from a functional perspective.
If your builders are creating a brand new blueprint for every house /structure and designing everything from scratch then I think it’s more similar, probably closer to commercial property builders with large structures.
Now under that perspective, I still don’t exactly understand why you’d treat labor cost deductions differently. Maybe the fact that these more complex products and services being built have higher return potential? I don’t know, I’m searching for a rational reason.
But, I do disagree treating software like something as commodified as many forms of labor. Someday we may get to that point with simple principles and procedures to follow, albeit technically, but we’re not there yet. At higher levels that may not be much “research” that’s needed but where the rubber meets the road, your engineers are checking to see what exists and doesn’t, designing new solutions to fill gaps in between, testing things, digging into previous things that don’t work and trying to fix them… it’s research.
As we continue to move more professions to an intellectual economy, many roles are becoming more and more like this, not just software. I’d say loading more roles and expectations on labor is also creating this situation where we’re asking more people to do more things they don’t know or can’t possibly know everything at a proficient level and the things we’re asking them to do don’t have solutions that can be written down and quickly referenced when needed as a simple recipe to follow. If you make the recipe general enough (e.g if a problem arises, find a solution and fix it at a low cost) then one might point to such highly generalized solutions and pretend it’s a solved problem but it’s not, it lacks any useful concretization. “You're not doing research, I told you ‘if a problem arises fix it’! There’s nothing to research you just do that!” doesn’t cut the muster.
That's not the case if you contract your builders out to build a house for someone else and they pay you for the hours, but IMHO it's also not the case (even with the new changes) for software developers being 'rented' as contractors to build stuff for others and the company getting paid for their hours.
Why? There's a clear relationship between R&D spend and economic growth. This is including R&D spend on non-scientific endeavours like commercial products + processes, which the majority of non-maintenance software work falls into.
Estimates vary, but I've never seen a cost/benefit analysis of unrestricted R&D that finds anything lower than a $2 return for every $1 spent in unrestricted R&D.
Do any of those businesses owe taxes before they've collected their first cent of revenue? That is the situation a software startup is now looking at.
Software is now in the unique position of being required to pay taxes on revenue instead of profit. If you spent $5M on development and raked in $100k, you'll be taxed on $100k (minus expenses, where the $5M must now be spread over 5 years). Of course, with those numbers, the company might want to spread costs over 5 years anyway (which they could already do).
So really, it's as if the tax code is specifically targeting bootstrapped companies that are reinvesting their profits back into the company. IMHO, the worst possible option of any that could have been chosen to milk software companies. Large established companies can afford it, VC companies were going to amortize anyway.
Yeah, you "eventually" can expense your costs. But that just means that it's a tax grab on the smaller companies that will be put out of business by this move. They pay all the tax this year, go out of business, and never get to reap the profit of the development work.
> Changes to R&D amortization were a rude surprise to them, as they'd never had to amortize software development before, and didn't think of the work they do as R&D.
Precisely. They didn’t think of their work as R&D because it was not R&D. Frankly, they should have seen this coming.
> These are small businesses we're talking about. Almost all of them make under $10M in annual revenue, and the vast majority are under $2M in revenue.
What about the millions of other small businesses that don’t get special tax treatment? Restaurants, bars, plumbing companies, landscaping companies, accounting firms, etc.? Software engineers are not scientists. At the end of the day, a company is supposed to be able to stand on its own two feet, not rely on government handouts. Allowing otherwise unprofitable businesses to stay in business disincentivizes innovation and efficiency, which harms productivity growth and makes us all poorer in the long run.