This is one of the most insightful comments in this entire thread. Public companies never drop news during the trading day, and Microsoft surely would have been notified in advance if they planned to fire him, and had some say in the timing of the release. Whatever it is, it is so serious that Microsoft would break that coda.
To add to this: please contact your Representative and Senators and tell them to tell Congressional leadership to fix R&D spending by the end of the year.
Congressional staff are required to keep tabs on everyone who calls in about an issue, so your time is well-spent.
The November 17 continuing resolution is our best chance to get this fixed, but only if enough members of Congress hear from their constituents about it!
A lot of the successful indie hacker stories you’ve heard are because they’re active on Twitter. There are thousands of solo dev entrepreneurs that don’t post on Twitter and are very quietly running great little internet businesses.
Oh man, I feel this. I’ve been doing a lot of furniture refinishing lately as a hobby. One piece is 90% done and another is 80% done. I was working on the 90% done one today, and was planning to lacquer it today so I can put the hardware on tomorrow and be done… but instead I found a few places where I should really touch up the paint. That pushes back completing it at least one more day as the lacquer needs to sit for a day and… I just need to “ship” the darn thing. I realized it’ll probably never be 100% perfect, and that’s okay - done is better than perfect, as they say. Having the courage to create something that isn’t perfect is a skill.
You do, if you want to claim the tax credit. But the R&D tax credit and R&E under Section 174 are two completely different things.
Until 2022, companies had the choice between expensing and amortizing software development under Section 174. (Section 174 specifically calls out all software development as falling under that section.) So they would only time track when they wanted to get the R&D tax credit, which only covers a portion of software development activities. R&D tax credit software development is a much narrower scope than R&E software development. So it didn't matter until now.
“In the case of a taxpayer’s specified research or experimental expenditures for any taxable year” …
Seems pretty obvious to me that the section only applies to what is claimed as R&E. Software development doesn’t have to be claimed as R&E, but if it is, now it unambiguously qualifies.
You don't specify what is R&E, the statute does. It's specified in the next section, and section c(3):
" “specified research or experimental expenditures” means, with respect to any taxable year, research or experimental expenditures which are paid or incurred by the taxpayer during such taxable year in connection with the taxpayer’s trade or business."
and
"For purposes of this section, any amount paid or incurred in connection with the development of any software shall be treated as a research or experimental expenditure."
Isn't the main problem that this change forces all software development, regardless of purpose, to be classified as R&E and therefore forced to be amortized?
No! That’s what confused CPAs are telling gullible startup founders.
Nothing forces you to classify engineering salaries or even contract expenses under the provisions of section 174 which describe “research and experimental expenditure”. There are some reasons historically why people elected to do that, but that may be a bad idea moving forward and honestly seems rather dishonest to me. No, your Jira clone is not “research and experimental expenditure”, it’s just a fucking database with a UI… just like 97% of all other startups. It’s more like: if you can use section 174 because you spun up a project to research curing diabetes with nano bots, then your software development allocated towards the project also counts as R&E, cheers.
Repeat after me: “my core business is not a research and experimental expenditure, it’s just a normal mundane boring operating expense”.
Honestly people like you posting these articles claiming that “weird legislative inaction is fucking over startups and small business” and further pushing the “all work that involves scripting a computer 110% must be classified as software R&E” narrative in comments, in spite of so many people telling you that such a conclusion is batshit stupid, makes me question whether there’s some ulterior motive in play. Like what, are all the accounting firms realizing their CPAs don’t outperform TurboTax if they can’t use their secret software R&E magic loophole and have thus deployed the shills, who show founders ridiculous mega tax bills..obviously perturbing them into posting their re-shills? Anecdotally, I know exactly zero founders who are getting “fucked over” by this because they aren’t stupid enough to structure their taxes in a way that causes their employees’ salaries to magically become capitalized voodoo money. Like, man, cut the histrionics… and find a better tax person.
Whether you can shop around to find someone who can tell you what you want to hear is unrelated to the mixed fact and law question of whether it is a defensible position that software development salaries must be capitalized.
They have been. Large companies have been engaging with Congress since 2019 on this, reminding them that they intended to revert this before it took effect. CFOs wrote a letter to Congress in November. https://investinamericasfuture.org/Communications/letters/
The key problem here is that for 70+ years companies have had the option to amortize or expense these costs. This change was made as an accounting sleight of hand to make the 2017 tax cuts look paid for over a long-term basis, but Congress never intended for this change to take effect. They know it isn't good tax or economic policy.
So now small businesses and startups are being thrown into crisis because Congress has accidentally implemented policy that they haven't gotten around to fixing.
On the one hand, Section 174 clearly stipulates: "(3)Software development
For purposes of this section, any amount paid or incurred in connection with the development of any software shall be treated as a research or experimental expenditure." [1]
Section 174 R&E expenses are much more expansive than what qualifies under the R&D tax credit criteria. This article has a rundown of some of the activities included in 174. It's well beyond software or salaries -- it also includes things like market research. It also includes any expenses in connection with R&E, so for example time using a server for new features or new products would have to be amortized but maintenance (bug fixes) wouldn't. Even if a company files for R&D tax credits, they won't be able to offset this increase. [2]
Lastly, since Congress was widely expected to revert this before it took effect, the IRS didn't issue full guidance on how to implement it. They've never had to define software development before, but the interpretation that Big 4 accounting firms are taking is that it covers new products AND new features on existing commercial products, but not straight maintenance.
Link [2] lists activities related to software development and includes maintenance and debugging. As I understand it this is for the older #41?
• Programming
• Tuning and benchmarking of software
• Performing software maintenance and debugging
...
Am I understanding this correctly that there are two different things at play here: the Section 41 tax credit which works in the companies' favor by allowing them to deduce R&D expenses. Then the Section 174 that requires all expenses to be amortized and the big issue for software firms is that the definitions of R&D differes where it's narrow R&D for the credit, but very broad for #174, resulting in a cash flow problem?
Is it? "In the case of a taxpayer’s specified research or experimental expenditures for any taxable year—" is pretty clear. That means what someone wants to claim as research and experimental expenditures. "For the purposes of this section" also seems pretty clear. If you want to claim software development as R&E, it unambiguously qualifies. And now all R&E must be amortized.
I am not a tax expert, but it doesn't seem like there's any reason you have to claim software development as R&E.
For purposes of this section, any amount paid or incurred in connection with the development of any software shall be treated as a research or experimental expenditure.
It means before you may have had to justify whether software development qualified as R&E, now you don’t. It unambiguously qualifies, if you’re claiming it as R&E. And unlike before, R&E must now be amortized.
But AFAIK you don’t need to claim it as R&E. That everyone has to claim all software development as “research and experimental expenditure” seems completely unfounded and a misunderstanding.
Yup. Exactly. And from that perspective this is actually a good thing, because now you don’t have to worry about whether software development qualifies as R&E.
