Comment by robocat

I know nothing about this topic, But I think your accountant was talking about R&D tax credits, which is a different topic from R&D capitalisation and depreciation. The tax credits might be another reason why companies previously wanted to claim developers salaries as R&D.

The issue here seems to be that software development wages are now supposed to be treated as R&D per https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35615217