This change has been discussed as an unfortunate legislative oversight, something that both parties want to fix but, by gosh, Congress just can’t seem to figure out how to get it on their busy agenda.
However, from my perspective, I see this as a clever way to depress developer salaries which have risen in recent years. This tax change makes small companies and startups much less viable, so there will be fewer places for developers to work. As others have noted, it will also alleviate competitive pressure faced by the entrenched players.
Given these lobbyist-friendly “side effects”, I wonder if we will ever see this trash taken out.
I'm begging to feel like the only way that'll ever have a chance to happen is if the show Designated Survivor becomes reality. Obviously many of the trash will be replaced by more trash but perhaps not all of it.
I have a perfect example as to why these rules are unfair. I work in the healthcare industry and a lot of the r&d is because it has to keep up with new regulations set out every year.
So the government is forcing expenses on us.... And then making us wait to deduct.
Making you build an asset and treat it as an asset from a tax perspective.
Sounds like you’re really complaining that you have to deal with regulation in the healthcare industry. Your post has nothing of merit about why it’s not right to treat it as a capital asset. You’re just whining that it’s worse than the status quo you had before.
I'm gonna bet that there is very little discovery in your work and you are essentially translating spec into code. Now your process for doing this is undoubtedly bloated and slow as shit (you said its healthcare right?) but that doesn't make it r&d.
I’ve been watching this story for a year+, and I fully agree with the outrage, but I haven’t heard of any startups that went under because of this. I wonder if everyone is just blowing it off or classifying those expenses as something other than R&D and just hoping they can defend in the case of an audit? Where are all the horror stories from the effects of this law?
You can still pay employees to write software and treat it as a regular expense. But if you want preferable treatment for R&D expenses now you need to amortize over 5 years. That’s all.
The problem is that I don't understand what the preference is.
If your employee has a salary of $X, then the taxable expense should only be $X, it does not matter what the employee is doing.
So I don't understand what the benefit of classifying an employee's salary as being R&D was prior to this rule change.
That's the whole point of my question. As far as I can tell, every actual expense is tax deductible, which (from the complaints) implies that either there's an expense I'm not aware of that is no longer deductible (which seems bad), that the R&D classification allowed you to move when you claimed the expenses regardless of when they were actually incurred, or that R&D was used to classify non-expenses as if they were expenses. Only the first option seems reasonable to complain about, the 2nd seems of limited use (based on the complaints being made), and if it's the last option I would think everyone would support the rule change as the last option is imo fraud.
From the way people are complaining I'm assuming that it's not the last option, but I do not understand what the issue is here, because I don't understand what this mysterious "R&D" expense is, if not salaries, consumables, and equipment depreciation. Which are all taxable expenses.
This issue brings forth a wave of angry software devs that don’t know anything about taxes asserting that this is unprecedented and crazy. But at the end of the day, building software, ESPECIALLY for a novel startup, is building an asset.
There might be some argument that there’s regular maintenance to be considered but generally speaking you are “building”. And that means it’s a capitalized cost. “It’s bad for me startup” is such a weak argument…
Okay, let's say that you are right and it doesn't matter if startups get disadvantaged and software developer salaries get depressed.
You would still have to fill out in your time sheet whether you are doing maintenance or R&D. This will lead to developers being burdened with more bureaucratic busy work.
From 12:30 to 13:00 I was working on updating software library X Y Z to the latest version and changing the code to use the new API. From 13:00 to 14:00 I added a new feature using the new API.
Are those first thirty minutes maintenance? Can you deduct them? You as a software developer will have to know the tax rules now.
What is a capitalized cost? What is the logic in taxing this kind of cost more than others, or spreading the tax break over more years?
I have some guesses, but I don't understand the basic philosophy of what should be a tax on the business, what should be a tax on the business owners (when their property becomes more valuable, e.g. capital gains tax), and what should be a tax on the employees' salaries (I guess this part is analogous to a sales tax on products the business buys).
The basic idea behind accounting is recognizing when value comes in and out. E.g. if you get $100M up front to do work over 10 years, you don’t get $100M in revenue and nothing over the next 9 years. You spread the 100 over 10 years. Even if the cash comes in immediately.
Capitalizing a cost means you’re saying this is a cost that is needed to build an asset that will provide value over time. If you build a factory or an app that is expected to help generate revenue over the next ten years then its dev costs should be allocated over the next ten years.
Companies want to say all of the cost belongs in year 1 so that they can avoid paying any taxes in year 1. It is not taxed “more”. Capital gains tax is a separate thing not relevant to what’s being discussed. The salaries are not being taxed either (payroll tax is a separate idea here too). The question is which years should the salaries applied against revenue.
Angry software devs who likely believe any taxation is unjust. Today a startup can go from 0 to a 5bn IPO in 10 years without ever having made an accounting profit, and they get R&D credits they can deduct from payroll taxes along the way.
You're going to get more of those startups and less Startups that actually make a profit now. Why? Because a startup burning investor money doesn't have enough revenue to pay taxes in the first place. It is especially bootstrapped and cashflow positive startups that get hit hard and need outside investors to pay their tax debts now.
This law is a problem and should be fixed, but even if the law takes effect as written most start-ups will still be unprofitable and thus still won't pay income tax.
Unfortunately it’s not that simple. You can’t deduct software dev (aka r&d per section 174) as an operating expense. Instead the expense is capitalized over 5 years. The effect is to make software companies look a lot more profitable than they actually are according to normal accounting standards. It hits bootstrapped companies particularly hard.
Matters are of course more complicated than this because nothing in the IRS code is really simple at least as far as corporate taxes are concerned. It’s an incredibly stupid law.
They generally are more profitable though. The dev costs are tangential to the revenue and expenses. If you spend $100 building your app and earn $100 that year, you can still sell the app next year. Perhaps you still need some dev work to maintain it. But it’s misleading to suggest you earned 0 profit. That dev effort is going to apply its value to the company over time.
> But it’s misleading to suggest you earned 0 profit. That dev effort is going to apply its value to the company over time.
I would be with you except that Section 174 just says the following: [0[
.03 Activities that are treated as software development. Activities that are treated as
software development for purposes of § 174 generally include but are not limited to:
(1) Planning the development of the computer software (or the upgrades and
enhancements to such software), including identification and documentation of the
software requirements;
(2) Designing the computer software (or the upgrades and enhancements to such software);
(3) Building a model of the computer software (or the upgrades and enhancements to such software);
(4) Writing source code and converting it to machine-readable code;
(5) Testing the computer software (or the upgrades and enhancements to such
software) and making necessary modifications to address defects identified during
testing, but only up until the point in time that:
(a) In the case of computer software developed for use by the taxpayer in its
trade or business, the computer software is placed in service; and
(b) In the case of computer software developed for sale or licensing to others,
technological feasibility has been established, product masters(s) have been produced,
and the computer software is ready for sale or licensing to others; and
(6) In the case of computer software developed for sale or licensing to others (or
the upgrades and enhancements to such software), production of the product master(s).
It makes sense to think of some degree of capitalization for software development but this definition is not defensible for anyone who has the least understanding of how software businesses (including SaaS) actually work. It sounds like it was written in the 1970s.
Ok but why is that relevant? Does that actually change anything about the actual issue? Or do you just not like the specifics of how they describe dev work in a way that does not affect tax treatment?
The fact that something needs to be maintained is not evidence that it’s not an asset. Perhaps the maintenance should be expensed.
But people are kidding themselves if they think the majority of development is not making something that will be useful for longer than the immediate year.
What does your company do? Oh we make X. Well developing X is building an asset.
"Unprofitable" startups will pay taxes on revenue that isn't really "profit"
If a b2b startup has some contracts which total $1 million per year in sales, but their dev expenses are also $1 million per year, you're right, the startup is unprofitable. But now they'll still have to pay taxes on the $800K of sales after their 20% immediate-year deduction for dev expenses
Only if the startup wishes to take advantage of R&D credits or otherwise wants to treat dev expenses more favorably than other expenses, which is optional. Otherwise revenue - expenses < 0 and no taxes will be due, like before.
I very much doubt that big tech companies lobbied for this law, they seem to survive on buying up small companies. This is going to eliminate those small companies.
The point of buying up small companies is to avoid them growing into competition. If there are fewer startups around, the price of buying your way into maintaining incumbency decreases.
Changing R&D expensing rules so software development must be capitalized rather than expensed is disastrous for the SaaS industry.
Seriously? Playing by the rules that every business has to play by will be “disastrous” for the SaaS industry? Then so be it. Maybe this will cull some crappy unicorns that do nothing but lose money for years on end. It might be healthy for companies to buckle down and create value again.
> Playing by the rules that every business has to play by
The rules that 'every business has to play by' are that salaries, pretty much regardless of department and role, are an expense.
Rewriting the rules such that 'programmer salaries can't be treated like salaries' is very very weird - in fact singling out any form of regular salary payment to non-stakeholders/c-suite for special tax treatment is incredibly weird.
I don't know of a system anywhere in the world that requires salaries to be considered as anything other than an expense.
Amortization/capitalision has always been strictly for purchases of hardware etc.
It's hard to overstate how weird a change this is. This is going to make many many many software development businesses simply non-viable overnight.
Also it creates an odd level of complexity - how do you consider the salary of a programmer who's also a sysadmin? How are DevOps salaries treated? Do all roles have to be strictly defined as 'development' or 'operations'? Can 'new product' developers do bugfixes? If you hire a guy purely to fix bugs do you have to prove that's their role?
I really don’t think of software development as being very partisan. It seems like it would be left wing based on geography but there’s this strong libertarian streak throughout all of technology.
It maybe be easier to understand this viewpoint if we consider that instead of paying a salary to developers, the company could pay an independent contractor to develop a software application.
Clearly payments to the outside contractor would not be expenses needed to run the company, but rather a purchase of an asset. But using inhouse employees instead wouldn't really materially change what the money is spent on. I guess the situation is the same when a company uses its employees to build a house, instead of buying one.
So that is the reasoning behind the law I guess but I still don't think it is a good idea. Research and Development is something the government would be wise to promote and support.
It's not a good idea because it's not how things are done in literally any other country that develops software. This makes all US development shops immediately 1/5th as profitable (on the books) as non-US shops. Yes, they catch up after 5 years, if they're still in business.
I'm not sure that I'm overstating it but this law change will, I think, effectively eliminate onshore software development as a profitable activity.
It's very strange that this hasn't been checked back given the size of the sector. I don't normally believe stories about US government dysfunction - which seems mostly like a dog and pony show - but for something like this not to have been rectified is a bit odd.
US dev shops are immensely more profitable than anything else. It’s not about where the devs are, it’s whether you’re a U.S. company. So that’s all moot.
Not all. For example if you hire someone and over 2 years they work on constructing a factory for you, you would capitalize their salary with the capital asset ie the factory.
However, from my perspective, I see this as a clever way to depress developer salaries which have risen in recent years. This tax change makes small companies and startups much less viable, so there will be fewer places for developers to work. As others have noted, it will also alleviate competitive pressure faced by the entrenched players.
Given these lobbyist-friendly “side effects”, I wonder if we will ever see this trash taken out.