That sounds pretty horrible. Am I correct in assuming though that once you get over the five year hump, you're OK? Also wouldn't startups mostly be paying devs out of VC funding rather than revenue the first five years?
No, you never “catch up” unless you fire every software engineer (so income and trailing five years of amortization cancel out).
Year 5 is just a steady state of no more phantom profit taxes, but you never really get that extra tax you paid back if you want to keep operating at the same level or grow.
That makes sense, thanks for clarifying. How do you think businesses would react to this? For example, I imagine self-hosted servers would need to be depreciated too, so the tech community invented cloud as the solution. Maybe this policy change will cause tech companies to hire more TVCs rather than FTEs?
Contractor expenses to develop software are also R&D. As would cloud expenses for your test environment, probably. More likely, companies will engage in activities that are arguably not "software development," including things like maintaining existing software.
Presumably if a company doesn't build software in-house and "buys a product", then that's not R&D? Then, the companies making said "products" would be based in countries that don't have such draconian laws...
What about an architect's salary? Does the firm who designs the building amortize the cost of that labor, while the purchaser of the building also amortizes the entire cost of the building?
How about EEs who design the hardware? Are they included?
> If you buy a building, you can’t depreciate the whole thing instantly
The same should hold of course if you buy software.
But if you ask your employee to perform a task like writing a program you are not buying anything. You are paying the employee's salary whether the software they are writing ever gets out of the compiler or not.
So wouldn't there be a way around this by changing the titles of software developers to "software janitors" for instance ?
After 5 years dont you end up with some "finished" R&D project that then can be later amortized, over say next 3 (or 5 years), so you reduce your tax base by those 2 million later on?
After 5 years the first years salaries are considered to be a "finished" R&D project, which means there's nothing left to amortize.
The only thing like that is that if, after a few years, you fire all your devs (or at least, all devs working on adding new features and building new products), then you can keep amortizing the last 4 years of salaries for your now-fired workers over the next few years, which reduces your tax base. But I mean, by that point, who cares? Any software business that has fired all its devs is over.
Doesn't help; what matters is your total R&D spend which - apparently according to current guidance - includes all/most of programmer salaries.
If you spend is going up, you're pre-paying more and more tax on profits you haven't earned yet. If your spend is constant, you'll stay the same amount behind. If your spend declines you'll start to catch up, and if it drops to 0 and stays there for ~4 years you'll catch up to where you would have been without the law change...but if you start spending again you have to start pre-paying again.
Software was targeted directly because they couldn't agree how to change 230. There are those who want to punish the "tech" people who were "censoring" things they didn't want censored. It was designed to be tactical retribution.
The general public absolutely despises software engineers for being able to earn good money with good work-life balance. It's pure jealousy. The general public has been cheering during the tech layoffs.
I haven't much evidence for that, and what little I did see was more about validation that a lot of large tech companies have insane, managerial bloat.
You can balance hiring additional staff and potential tax savings (not a great idea but possible-ish). And a lot of software dev does feel like R&D (experimental development).
Office Manager: 100% expense.
Software Engineer: 20% over 5 years (actually only 10% for the first year).
If they’re international then 6.67% over 15 years.
Not only that, but the effect “stacks” over the years.
By the time you get to year 5, you’ve paid tax on $2,000,000 of phantom profits you never had.If you’re a C Corp that’s $420,000 in extra federal taxes (plus whatever state tax).
If you’re a smaller company you’re probably a S Corp and federal and state tax could be ~50% passed through to your personal return.
How any owner survives that, I’m not sure.