No, that's literally the Section 174 change. You now must count them as R&D.
The relevant paragraph from Section 174:
>
(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.
What "in connection with" means is vague. I think a reasonably competent tax attorney could probably argue that the costs of running your production cloud serving existing customers don't count, but IANAL.
No, that's literally the Section 174 change. You now must count them as R&D.
The relevant paragraph from Section 174:
> (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.
https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/26/174
So that would include everything? - cloud/hosting expenses - system administrators/devops engineers and their laptops, workstations - project management software, office software, support, etc - project managers, designers, technical writers, qa engineers - software licenses, domain names, certificates, etc - internet bandwidth, data-centers, HVAC, backups
What "in connection with" means is vague. I think a reasonably competent tax attorney could probably argue that the costs of running your production cloud serving existing customers don't count, but IANAL.
What if some executive tweaks a "no code" tool? Technically, the name says that there's no coding involved.
Presumably that still counts as "developing software"- the regulation doesn't mention "coding" at all.
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what if you don't call it "software development"?
how about "business process mechanization"?
At that point you’re so into tax fraud that you light as well call them “postage and shipping”
OMG, I can't believe how prudish HN commenters are!
Have you seen who's leading the most powerful orgs these days?
Have you seen what's going on?
"business process mechanization" is a fair description of what we do and probably would be just fine, tax-wise
Then you risk going to jail.
I mean sometimes fraud works, sometimes it doesnt.
How would that help? R&D developers helped saving taxes, now they don’t.
Classifying them as non R&D doesn’t help saving taxes again.